The Night I Almost Left, and the Light That Would Not Let Me Go

There is a night in my past that sits inside me like a photograph left too close to a flame, a memory softened at the edges yet crystal clear where it matters. It was a moment suspended between surrender and survival that I carried in silence for seventeen years.

It was 2008, and I was living in Chicago. Back then, the ache inside me felt too heavy to hold. It was not a sharp pain or a dramatic despair, but a slow erosion of the spirit, a quiet collapse that happens when you have walked through more shadows than your nervous system knows how to translate. There is a kind of loneliness that does not cry out. It curls inward. It roots itself in the chest. It makes the world feel muffled, as though you are observing your life from behind glass.

One humid summer night, long after midnight, I found myself driving without destination. Street after street felt emptier, quieter, as if the city had slipped into another dimension. At around two in the morning, I reached a remote set of train tracks, a place where nothing stirred and no one passed. I drove onto the tracks, stopped in the center, turned off the engine, turned off the lights, and let the stillness settle like dust.

I was not angry. I was not crying. I was not pleading with the universe. I was simply tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. It was a soul level fatigue. And then a strange thing happened. I fell asleep inside the car.

No thoughts.

No fear.

No goodbye.

Only surrender, a body too overwhelmed to keep bracing itself.

When I woke up, 2 hours had passed by and the darkness had barely shifted, yet something in me had.

The world was unchanged, but I was still breathing. Still here. Still alive on rails that could have rewritten everything.

No train had come.

No rumble.

No horn.

No witness.

Nothing...

Just me in a cold car at the edge of myself, alive against all odds. I reversed off the tracks with trembling hands and drove home sobbing through empty streets. I got home, went to sleep and for seventeen years, I carried the quiet shame of that night like a bruise beneath the skin.

But with time, and healing, and all the cosmic insight that has shaped my journey, I learned something this week, I could not see back then. The girl in that car was not weak. She was not broken. She was overwhelmed. She was alone. She was exhausted in ways that no one around her understood. She deserved compassion, not shame. She deserved rest, not judgment. She deserved a future she could not yet imagine.

And the truth I can finally say out loud is this: nothing in me knew how to die that night. But, something in me is finally remembering how to live.

Little did I know that the hardest years of my life would come after that moment. More unraveling. More exposure of truths. More excavation of buried wounds. Yet through all of it, something in me kept rising. A spark in me refused extinction. A quiet vow whispered again and again. Not yet. Not me. Not now.

When the world shifted in 2020, my inner world cracked open. What looked like chaos on the outside became a doorway for me. A slow unmasking. A spiritual rupture that forced me inward to meet the self I had abandoned so many years before. Then came the writing. The visions. The insights. The cosmic threads that had always been pulling me forward.

And the lyrics of the song I created struck me with the weight of a prophecy fulfilled:

"Still burning, still flying, every move electrifying. Every heartbeat hits the ground, echoes back, a victory sound. Still glowing, still growing, feel that inner fire flowing. Nothing in you learned to die, you are still alive, still alive."

These words are not just lyrics. They are testimony. A map back to that night. A mirror of my resurrection. A truth etched into the marrow of my story.

I did not survive by accident.

I survived because my soul was not done.

I survived because the woman I am now was still waiting in the future, calling me forward. I survived because there were worlds inside me that had not yet been born. I survived because the universe held me when I could not hold myself.

I share this now because silence nourishes shame.

It grows in the dark, feeding on secrecy, convincing us that our lowest moments say something about who we are. For seventeen years, I carried the weight of that night like a secret stone beneath my ribs. I carried the fear of what could have been. I carried the ache of the moment my spirit collapsed.

But the truth is that the ache we carry is never meaningless. It is a teacher. A compass. A doorway that leads us back to ourselves, though the path is often unkind.

It took me seventeen years to understand that my night on the tracks was not a failure. It was the moment my soul paused long enough for a new story to gather strength inside me. It was a threshold I stood at, not to cross into ending, but to cross back into life.

Someone out there is holding their own dark night right now. Someone believes their exhaustion is shameful. Someone thinks their collapse means they are broken.

You are not broken.

You are not beyond repair.

You are standing in the sacred in-between where rebirth begins.

For me, the years that followed became a long walk back to myself.

A slow reclamation. A gathering of wisdom that could not have existed without surviving that moment. And now, in a full circle I never expected, the song I wrote became something far greater than a melody.

This song is the sound of me turning that shame into a hymn of reclamation. Every lyric, every note, every pulse in the track carries the truth I could not speak back then. It is the alchemy of a moment I once hid from the world. It is the fire born from the ashes of who I used to be.

It is proof that the girl in the car did not vanish. She transformed.

When I sing along this song, still burning, still flying, I am not just singing words. I am speaking life into the version of me who almost slipped away. I am telling her you survived, you rose, you became.

This song is my offering to her and to anyone who knows what it feels like to disappear inside their own hurt.

There is always hope hidden in the ache.

There is always light curling at the edges of the dark.

There is a spark in every soul that refuses to die.

Sometimes it takes seventeen years to reclaim it.

Sometimes the reclamation becomes a hymn.

And sometimes that hymn becomes the beginning of a brand new life.

I am here.

Still burning.

Still rising.

Still learning.

Still unfolding.

Still carrying the flame forward....

Still alive. ☥

Nothing Learned To Die

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