Someone told me
they’d become good at making pancakes
as if mastery had quietly crept in
after years of early-morning battles.
And I could almost see them:
the pancake corpses,
scattered like pale moons across a kitchen floor.
Little doughy casualties of a person learning
how not to burn every beginning.
I see honesty in a graveyard of flat attempts
each one a soft failure,
a warm surrender,
a circle that didn’t rise
but it still mattered.
But I look at those imagined pancake corpses
and I feel weirdly understood
like someone else knows the weight of practice,
the ache of wanting to be good
at anything, maybe a little something,
even if it’s small like breakfast.
Isn’t that a good definition of growth?
A private cemetery of trial and error,
And too-many-batter days.
We don’t talk about the messes
and the undercooked hopes,
or the overdone fears,
but they pile up quietly,
silently teaching.
An archive of almosts,
attempts that didn’t rise,
mornings where the batter was just too heavy
with whatever was dragging me down.
Then, somewhere between the first collapse
and the fiftieth try, a rhythm formed
My wrist became steady over a pan that forgives,
My hand no longer pulled back in fear
when the spatula flipped over
The pancake corpses remain,
not as shame, but as proof
that persistence has a body count,
and softness survives
Only when it refuses to stop.
I say, bless the early ruins.
Bless the sticky silhouettes of mornings that failed.
There’s comfort in knowing that everything beautiful
is built from the bodies of what came before.
There were many versions of me
that never made it to the plate.
Every fallen flapjack was a small lesson in continuing,
and every perfect circle
was once a beautiful spill on the kitchen floor
that someone dared to clean up
and try again.