The Circle Returns

Written by Selahmon Risingsun Photo by hello aesthe

I tried to run from the roots.
Tried to outrun the ghosts of my bloodline.
Four years of silence carved between me and my father,
a silence born of wounds,
boundaries,
and the kind of pain you tuck away like knives under the bed.

I swore I’d never come back.
But circles are sacred.
And life is a circle.

Here I am.
Not because I lost—
but because the circle called me home.

The girl I was once trembled in shadows,
but the woman I am now stands in firelight.
Her eyes are not the same.
Her bones have been baptized in storms.
She knows that return is not regression.
Return is resurrection.

We try to break from our family’s threads,
but threads become roots,
and roots always remember.
The stillness of this moment says:
stop fighting.
Look again.
See what has grown in the ruins.

The past has claws, yes.
But I do not bleed for it anymore.
The grudge is a chain.
And I am not meant to be bound.

So I forgive—
not to erase,
but to exhale.
I release—
not to excuse,
but to live.

This is the alchemy:
to turn bitterness into breath,
to turn history into healing,
to turn a wound into a window.

Full circle is not a prison.
It is a spell.
It is medicine.
It is where I remember that roots are not cages.
Roots are where the magic begins.

Lesson

Return is not defeat; it’s initiation.
Look with new eyes.
Let forgiveness free you and boundaries keep you whole.
Judge the now, not the story then—are they repairing, am I growing?
If yes: root and rise.
If no: bless and go.
Either way, I become.