The year I turn 40
I’ll unlearn the rules I never agreed to in the first place.
I’ll show up like an anthem with lipstick and thunder.
The year I turn 40
Is the year I’ll respond to drama with “Not me, not any longer.”
I’ll keep planting wildflowers where people expect lawns.
I’ll manifest magic by being magnetic to the momentum that builds legacies,
attracting energies and abundant entities
Some call it angels
Some call it fairies
God’s work or Heart work
Co-creating with the universe
My spirit knows what I’m here for and
I trust it
Knowing
It’s been ten years since Alexa ever would.
And two, since Kimon ever could.
So I live for us all.
I laugh for us all.
I wear bindis for the ones who left too soon
I carry them in my courage, too
I thought I’d be somewhere else by now.
I thought I’d have more
certainty, more answers,
more family.
Instead, I’m here –
With laughter lines and quiet heartbreak
still holding a soft corner in my heart
for something that may never arrive.
This is the year I mourn time.
The ticking clock I pretended not to hear in my thirties.
The spaces I thought would be filled by now.
The echoes of “should’ve”
and “wasn’t meant to be.”
I grieve the time I thought was near,
The years I thought would bring me here.
The “should’ve been” and “why not me?”
The empty spaces still to see.
It’s been ten years since Alexa ever would,
Two years since Kimon never could.
Yet here I stand, still here.
I carry them both in my joy, my daring, my ache,
In my song.
They remind me,
They remind me,
That being alive
Is something sacred
They admired my fire
I’d be a fool not to blaze ahead with it.
So yes, there is sadness.
Yes, there is longing.
But there’s also thunder in my chest,
and lipstick that dares the world to stare.
The year I turn 40
I’ll stop asking for directions to places I was never meant to go.
I make the path by walking it, driven by the purpose burning in my heart.
The year I turn 40
Is the year I’ll honour the path only I could walk.
I’ll keep dancing barefoot where the map runs out.
I’ll toast to what I’ve lost,
What I’ve survived,
They remind me,
They remind me,
who I’ve become.
Forty isn’t failure.
It’s not too late.
It is, in fact, fire.
It’s fire and it’s mine.