The Field of Beings
(Four poems to cross memory, grace, doubt, and light)
By Sophie Rouméas

I.    From Inherited Weight to Awareness

Illness in your family
was never just a medical word.
It was a breath seeking passage
from mouth to mouth,
wanting to be heard
without ever naming itself.

You no longer need to carry its burden;
you choose to learn its language—
to be a nourishing presence,
not the reservoir of a shared pain.

The violence around you
no longer has the right
to paint itself upon your skin.
You will be neither victim, nor persecutor, nor judge—
you will be the breath that learns to stay dignified.
You will do what you can
to protect what is fragile
when the world grows too harsh.

The psychiatric storms around you
were tempests you, as a child, could not understand.
You thought love had forgotten you,
like a letter never sent.
But now you know:
you are someone good,
worthy of love,
and capable of loving in return.
You are learning resilience, and humility,
from those whose struggles
have taught you the tenderness of boundaries.

When you were a teenager,
your own inner world—
self-imposed privations,
bars made of habit and fear,
raised between you and your dreams.
You searched for the bridge
between emptiness and love.
But you no longer reduce yourself to your shadows:
you draw the essence from your quest,
you let its light seep into your calmer mind.
You remain faithful to your chosen task:
to help other tormented souls
move closer to their healing.

The violent death in your family
has long left its imprint on your skin.
You no longer blame yourself
for what you could not save.
You learn to forgive yourself,
to accompany grief
as one holds the hand of silence.

Addiction, too,
has woven its web around those you love.
Yet you are no longer ashamed
of not knowing how to mend.
You speak, you reach out,
you learn to love another way—
and to keep on loving yourself.

For comorbidity
is not only a neural network,
it is a network of love
spoken in a flawed language—
an invisible loyalty
where some make themselves ill
trying to heal those who suffer
while denying their own pain.
You see it now
not as a curse,
but as a map—
the map of love finally learning
a new way to speak, and to be.