The Weight of Jasmine
I wake to jasmine.
Not the flower but the memory. It curls against the back of my neck like a warm breath, like a secret whispered just before the world comes crashing back into focus. It reminds me that my body is a map, not of perfection, but of survival. Every curve, every stretch mark, every tremble is evidence that I have lived, that I am living, and that I am here.
On the mornings when anxiety waits like a shadow in my throat, I reach for the rituals that have kept me soft — a kneel beside the altar, a chant passed down through the lineage, breath sliding over the tongue like honey: "Ori mi, mo dupe." My head, I give thanks.
There is surrender in the stillness. In bowing my head low enough to hear the pulse of the earth beneath me. In saying, I do not need to carry it all. Not today.
That surrender is how I found her.
La’Rue. Not a person, but a version of myself I thought I buried under productivity and perfection. She waits for me in the mornings when I press shea butter into skin still warm from dreaming. She hums in the water of my bath, coiling around me with steam and intention. She is me, in pleasure. She is me, allowed.
We talk, La’Rue and I, in the language of sensation. Her dialect is slow. Silk. Weighted breath. Jojoba oil. She tells me that freedom is not something to chase but something to feel. And that shame, like tension, lives in the hips until you ask it to leave. She teaches me to ask with a hip circle. With a moan. With a laugh that escapes while I dance in my living room alone, a woman unbothered by the eyes of the world.
There is no shame in pleasure here.
I was taught that to be good, I must be quiet. To be strong, I must be still. That to want was dangerous. But La’Rue doesn’t care for rules that cage her. She stretches beneath my skin like prayer. Like rebellion. And when I kneel, I do it for her. Not out of obligation but as an offering to the wild, sensual spirit within me that has waited too long to be honored.
In this body — aging, aching, gloriously alive — I have found God in sensation. In rope brushing across my arms. In the ache of held poses. In the trembling that comes not from fear, but from being seen.
To inhabit myself is the holiest act I know.
And still, the jasmine lingers. Its scent woven through memory and presence alike, marking the places where I let go just enough to bloom. Where I chose softness. Where I chose me.
I am not what happened to me.
I am what I chose to feel afterward.
And today, I choose joy.
