Some things are easier to say when you don’t know who’s listening.
When the wind carries secrets,
I wonder if mine
are still looking for me.
I have whispered so many things
into the open air—
names I no longer say aloud,
prayers that never reached heaven,
apologies that belonged
to someone else.
I imagine the wind
keeping them all.
Tucking them beneath its ribs,
carrying them over oceans,
through forests,
past houses where little girls
still believe their mothers
will always protect them.
Maybe that’s why
it never stops moving.
Maybe grief
has made it too heavy
to rest.
I have secrets
that still wake before I do.
Secrets that smell like hospitals
and old bedrooms.
Secrets that remember
what my body spent years
trying to forget.
I don’t think silence
buries anything.
I think it teaches memories
how to echo.
Sometimes the wind
finds me again.
It slips through cracked windows.
Lifts my hair from my shoulders.
Whispers my own voice
back to me—
only older.
Softer.
Like someone
who survived the telling.
I wonder
how many of us
are breathing
the same air.
How many confessions
have passed through my lungs.
How many mothers
never heard the words
their children carried.
How many lovers
mistook silence
for peace.
The wind knows.
It has listened
to every goodbye
spoken too late.
Every I’m sorry
that arrived
after the damage.
Every I love you
that died
on the tip of a tongue.
When the wind carries secrets,
I hope it carries this one gently—
I survived.
Not gracefully.
Not without breaking.
But enough
that I can finally say it
without whispering.
And maybe,
just maybe,
the wind isn’t carrying my secrets away.
Maybe
it’s carrying them
to someone
who thought
they were the only one.
I think some things become harder to say the longer we carry them.
Eventually, they stop feeling like words and start feeling like weight.
That’s where this poem came from.
I liked the idea of the wind as something that has heard everything—the things we whispered when nobody was around, the apologies we never received, the words we never managed to say, and the stories we spent years keeping quiet.
But somewhere while writing it, the wind stopped feeling like something that was taking secrets away.
It started feeling like something connecting us.
Because maybe the things we’re convinced we have to carry quietly aren’t as uniquely ours as we think.
Maybe somewhere, someone else has whispered the same thing.
And maybe surviving something doesn’t always mean being able to talk about it loudly.
Sometimes being able to finally say, “I survived,” without whispering is enough.
Until next time,
—Destiny
P.S. If the wind could carry away one thing you’ve never been able to say out loud, would you let it?
destinylaharris 