God Gave Me Galaxies... and Hands That Could Barely Hold Rain

There is something cruel about giving a person a horizon they were never built to reach. Not because the mountain is too high. Not because the climb is impossible. But because every morning you wake already knowing exactly who you could become... and spend another day remaining who you are. I have never suffered from a lack of dreams. No I have suffered from having dreams that were far too large for the body they were buried inside. God, why place an ocean inside a pair of lungs? Why plant forests inside a seed that would never touch the rain? Why teach a heart the language of galaxies... then give it hands too small to carry a single star? I was born looking upward. That has always been my first mistake. The sky became my standard. The impossible became ordinary. And suddenly, the earth could no longer convince me it was enough. People say, "Dream big." As if dreams obey size. As if they arrive politely, asking permission before occupying your entire existence. Mine did not. Mine arrived like floods. They broke windows. They filled rooms. They climbed the walls of my ribs until there was no space left to breathe without imagining a different life. I have lived a thousand lives. Every single one inside my head. I have shaken hands with strangers I will never meet. Written books that will never yellow with age. Held children who will never learn my voice. Built homes that will forever exist only in the architecture of longing. And then... I open my eyes. The room is exactly where I left it. The ceiling still remembers my silence. The unfinished work still waits like a loyal dog whose owner never comes home. Tell me what do you call a person who has everything except the ability to become it? Because "potential" sounds too beautiful for something that hurts this much. Potential is just another word for grief that hasn't happened yet. It is attending the funeral of your future every single day... while everyone else keeps congratulating you for still being alive. Do you know what it feels like to be haunted by yourself? Not your past. Your future. The woman you were supposed to become. She visits me often. She never speaks. She simply looks at the life I am living, then quietly looks away. That silence has broken me more times than words ever could. Because disappointment from other people eventually fades. But disappointment in your own reflection... echoes. There are nights I hold my own hands and wonder whether they know how many universes they have failed to build. These hands. They have carried cups, keys, phones, groceries. Everything except the life my heart keeps handing them. Imagine being entrusted with a masterpiece... and discovering your fingers were never taught how to paint. Imagine being born with wings only to realize they were stitched to your shadow instead of your back. People tell me to be patient. As though time has ever stretched a hand. As though calendars can teach courage. As though tomorrow hasn't spent years arriving empty-handed. The truth is I am not afraid of failing. Failure belongs to people who reached. I am afraid of dying with fingerprints that never touched the life they spent an entire lifetime reaching toward. One day, someone will stand over my grave and speak about who I was. But no one will speak about the thousands I carried inside me. The writer. The artist. The builder. The dreamer. The woman who almost... became. How tragic that cemeteries are filled not only with the dead but with entire civilizations that never escaped the people who carried them. Perhaps that is why my hands feel so heavy. Not because they hold too much. But because they are dragging the weight of every unlived life behind them. Sometimes I wonder whether my dreams were never meant to be achieved. Only mourned. Like stars. Beautiful precisely because they cannot be held. So every morning I wake, look at my hands, and they are still the same size. Yet somehow, my dreams have grown again. And I think that is the cruelest thing God ever allowed. Not suffering. Not failure. Not even loss. But giving someone a heart large enough to imagine an entire universe... inside a body that spends its whole life apologizing for the length of its own reach. Because there is no loneliness quite like this: To spend your whole life standing beneath the exact sky you were born to touch... and realizing that your fingertips will forever stop one inch before heaven.