Monologue #3: On the Edge of Morning

I’ve been thinking about whether I can write joy—or if pain is the reason I can even recognize it. I set the pain down for a moment, wanting to give happiness a voice, and then my mind wandered. Could I express joy without having known sorrow? If I didn’t know the texture of ache, would the light feel as rich? Am I chasing a paradox, or living one? What I’ve come to understand is this: my happiness isn't loud or unshakable—it's in the meaning I find through the ache of transformation. There's beauty in suffering when it leads to growth, and for me, it has. I see the change with clarity. And I know this is just the beginning. Most days I accept that. Other days, I need reminding. That’s where humility lives—in the process. What follows is not an answer, but a reflection. A monologue from the edge of who I was, stepping into who I’m becoming.

On the Edge of Morning

Can I write joy?
Or is it only the shadow of pain that has taught me the shape of light?
I wonder this often, usually in the quiet—
when the night hasn’t quite let go
and the sky is still debating whether to rise.

Pain, I know.
Pain has carved rivers through me,
made valleys where there once were flatlands.
It’s honest, relentless—
and it’s made me pay attention.

But lately…
there is this thing.
This soft, golden thing that arrives not with trumpets,
but with the sigh of birds and the shy stretch of light over rooftops.
Joy.

Not loud. Not demanding.
Just… here.
Present the way breath is present when you stop trying to hold it.

I used to belong to dusk.
To the ache of endings,
to the velvet hush of moonrise,
to the safety of being unseen.

But something has shifted.
Life—or maybe loss—has spun me toward morning.
And dawn,
that unfamiliar face,
now feels like a mirror I didn’t know I needed.

Joy—
if it’s a color, it’s the ones at dawn, isn’t it?
Those first hues after the black has burned away.
The blues that haven’t yet decided they’ll become sky,
the orange like the breath of something divine
exhaling over the edge of the earth.

If it’s a sound, it’s the birds.
But not just the birds—
it’s the vibration of their song.
There’s a certain kind of wakefulness in the morning air
that doesn’t exist at dusk.
It’s a different kind of permission.

I used to live for the moon.
I was a creature of dusk,
a loyal student of shadow.
But now—
now I can capture the morning light perfectly.
I didn’t seek this shift,
but life…
life will reassign you without asking.

And I’ve accepted this displacement,
because in it is new learning,
absorption, awakening.
Even if I didn’t plan it—
even if some days, I still miss the comfort of darkness.

There’s a difference, I’ve learned,
between happiness and joy.
Happiness is quicksilver—
slippery, bright, often borrowed.
Joy feels more like a moment you can bottle—
solid, still, deeply yours.

Maybe I am playing with semantics.
But isn’t that what poets do?
We give names to things that don’t ask for them—
we try to frame the light
even as it shifts.

My happiness, if I name it now,
is in knowing that the pain of this transformation
was not for nothing.
That there is beauty in the suffering
when the suffering is not just decay—
but a kind of compost for the soul.

Growth has come.
Clarity has come.
And with them, humility—
the kind that kneels quietly,
not as a surrender,
but as a reverent knowing:
This is just the beginning.

Some days, I remember that easily.
Most days, I carry it gently.
Other days, I forget, and must be reminded—
and even that forgetting is part of the becoming.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai