There once was a girl who carried a lighthouse in her chest
Not on her chest... in it
Right between her ribs, where most people kept a heart.
Her 'heart' beat differently
In fact, it didn’t beat at all
It flashed... cyan and orange... pulsing like a soft signal calling out to sea.
She didn’t know how it got there. Only that it had always lived inside her.
One autumn evening, a strange kind of storm arrived.
Wasn’t wind.
Not the rain.
But the kind that makes everything inside you tilt… like gravity no longer knows where to pull.
That’s when he appeared;
A sailor.
Drifting out of the fog with a shipwrecked charm,
Words like butterflies,
Laughter like a melody she somehow already knew.
It made the lighthouse inside her sing.
He looked like the kind of broken soul who still believes in magic
He told her he could read the signals of her light
That he understood them
That he saw the unsettling waves she kept hidden in the dark inside her.
For a while, it felt like magic.
They spent hours tucked away from the world...
talking, laughing, getting lost in each other.
She showed him the cracks in her lighthouse
And he kissed every broken brick like it was a vow.
But magic, as it does, began to fade.
The sailor had shadows stitched under his skin
Shadows he never spoke of
Shadows that whispered things when the sun turned away.
One day, his ship vanished
And he... disappeared.
But the storm didn’t.
He was gone
But his echoes remained
His name haunted the wind in her town.
Sometimes she’d find traces
Footprints on the shoreline,
Or a song he used to hum buried in the sand.
Reminding her that none of it was a dream.
Or a nightmare she wanted to forget.
Her lighthouse was broken.
People told her to board it up, to forget, to move on.
But she couldn't.
It wasn’t grief she held
It wasn't him that she missed.
It was the memory...
Of how love used to feel
How it took away her loneliness.
The belief that someone had seen her for who she truly was - a glowing light.
One day, she began to notice something...
The lighthouse in her chest didn’t dim The orange glow she had did not go away.
It flickered, yes. It faltered, yes.
But the light never went out.
One quiet evening, she found herself at the shore and stood there for a while... Just her, the waves, and a stillness she hadn’t felt in a long time.
With the wind brushing past her and no one else around, it finally hit her:
She had been the lighthouse all along.
She was the shelter
The one who guided others
The Lighthouse was not inside her.
The Lighthouse... was her.
And now... travelers still pass her by. Some looking for shelter, others for love.
But she no longer bends her light to match their sails.
She just glows.
She knew somewhere out there;
across a sea she no longer chases,
A ruined ship drifts
Alone.
Empty.
Searching for a light it once tried to claim.
But the lighthouse is no longer calling.
It is becoming it's own star.
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