Perhaps karma
doesn’t always arrive
as punishment.

Perhaps sometimes
it arrives as a person.

A person who doesn’t love you enough.
Who doesn’t listen carefully.
Who touches you carelessly
or doesn’t touch you at all.
Who makes you question
whether you are asking for too much
when all you are asking for
is what you once gave freely.

And then comes the haunting thought.

What if this is the universe
handing me back
something I once handed someone else?

Not deliberately.
Not with a note attached.

Just

Here.

Remember this?

This is what it felt like.

And suddenly,
the past isn’t past.

It is sitting across from you
at the dinner table.

Sleeping beside you.

Ignoring you.

Leaving you wondering
how someone can be so close
and still make you feel
so profoundly alone.

What do you do with that?

Laugh?

Of course.

Because sometimes laughter
is the only thing keeping
the walls from closing in.

Cry?

No.

I’ve cried enough.

Instead,
I become introspective.

I examine the wreckage.

The choices.
The patterns.
The people I hurt.
The people I didn’t love carefully enough.
The moments I wasn’t listening.
The places where I was careless
with somebody else’s heart.

And I wonder
if this is retribution
or simply life being life.

Because karma is a dangerous word.

It can become an excuse
for suffering.

A neat little explanation
for something that is anything but neat.

Maybe we don’t get punished.

Maybe we get mirrors.

And sometimes
the mirror has a heartbeat.

Sometimes the universe
doesn’t send a lightning bolt.

It sends a person.

And suddenly
you are walking through
the minefield
of your own history,

trying to distinguish
between punishment
and lesson,

between consequence
and coincidence,

between what you deserve
and what you absolutely do not.

Perhaps the hardest part
of karma isn’t wondering
what we did wrong.

It’s deciding
what we will do differently
once we finally understand
what it felt like
to be on the other side.

Because maybe
the universe isn’t asking us
to suffer forever.

Maybe it’s asking us
to notice.

To remember.

To become gentler.

To stop the cycle.

And perhaps
that is where karma ends,

not with revenge,

but with recognition.

One more haunting goodbye
to the person we once were.

And one more chance
not to become
the person who hurt us.