Notes from the Balcony Where I Waited for Myself

There are places that hold memory like breath in the chest, suspended, expectant. The balcony was one of them.

It wasn’t glamorous. The paint peeled like old truths. The railing rusted where I once leaned too long. But it had a view, a cracked panorama of the world I wasn’t part of, not yet. It became a liminal space. Not quite inside. Not quite out. A threshold where I lingered, half ghost, half prayer.

I waited there.

Not for love. 

Not for redemption. 

I waited for me.

The version of me that didn’t flinch at her own reflection. The one who spoke without apologizing. The one who didn't mistake being needed for being loved. The self I lost in the crossfire of caretaking, code-switching, and compliance. The girl who got swallowed by expectations and never got a proper burial.

I wrote things down on that balcony, field notes, confessions, spells disguised as affirmations. 

“Don’t leave yourself behind again.” “It’s okay if no one claps.” “You are not too late.”

Sometimes I sipped tea as the sun cracked its way out of the night sky, pretending I was somewhere safe. Somewhere soft. But that balcony was never about safety, it was about stillness. A vantage point for witnessing the war within without running from it. And gods know, I’d run enough.

I cried there too. Not loud. Not messy. Just the slow, hot tears of someone grieving herself in real time.

And when I got tired of crying, I’d watch the birds. They didn’t ask permission to fly. They didn’t wait for a witness. They just went. I envied them at first. Then I began to listen.

From that height, I could hear what my life had been trying to tell me all along: You are not meant to vanish in your own story. You are not a placeholder for other people’s comfort. And you do not need to be rescued, you need to be received. By yourself, first.

Eventually, I stopped waiting. Not because she never came. But because she did.

One morning, I caught her reflection in the cracked mirror by the table. She looked a lot like me. Hair wild. Eyes steady. A quiet curve of defiance on her lips.

She sat down in the chair across from me and said, “I’ve been here the whole time.”

Where is the balcony in your life, the space between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming? What would happen if you sat with yourself there, long enough to be found?