I spent years trying to outrun myself.
Racing, panting, hiding.
Taking the back roads,
creating hollow shadows.Grasping at survival.
Moving fast enough
that the ghosts
couldn’t quite catch me.But what I didn’t know
was they were wearing my face.And sooner or later
every road ended
with me.-Mandy Ricks
Those that walked before us were not heroes.
Just people trying to survive.
Some broke, healed, or did a bit of both.
They carried grief.
Made mistakes.
Loved imperfectly.Still, they kept going.
Maybe that is the real inheritance.
Not perfection.
-Mandy Ricks
A few lines from my daughter, EJ.
“And that’s what makes both sides human
There was never a battle to be fought
No lines in the sand to be drawn
Just two sides of the same coin
That if they let it, the tide would take and wash away regardless.”
Peace doesn’t always arrive as happiness.
Sometimes it arrives as nothing needing to be fixed for a little while.-Mandy Ricks
(with Willow)
Peace isn’t always found in grand places.
Sometimes it’s a small shelter, a familiar view, and knowing you’re safe enough to watch the world instead of run from it—learning that not every battle has to be fought.
-Mandy Ricks
Inspired by Willow, (my cat), Chief of Security, Keeper of the Coffee Table Fortress, and Watcher of All Things.
Willow
Life is hard,
cruel.
Scars never stop aching.
But a point in time comes
where survival hardens into something dangerous —
something that gets back up-bleeding,
smoke in its lungs,
determined to set fire
to anything that tries to bury it again.
-Mandy Ricks
People called her difficult
without ever knowing what she had survived.They saw sharp edges,
but not the hidden shaking,
the resentment burning low in her chest.She learned to hide it all behind polite smiles
and half-finished replies.There were nights she stayed alive out of nothing but spite.
Days she moved through ordinary conversations
while entire sections of her were quietly collapsing behind the walls.Still,
she kept something alive in herself.Not hope.
Not happiness.Just a small stubborn refusal
to become as cold as the people who hurt her.And honestly,
that probably saved her life.-Mandy Ricks
The worst things are rarely the loudest.
They settle quietly,
letting the last line sit there like a bruise.-Mandy Ricks
Change never arrives gently.
It carves through you slowly
until one day
it catches you
mid-sentence, mid-cigarette, mid-grief—and you realize
the person staring back
no longer looks easy to destroy.—
-Mandy Ricks
Cars moved.
Coffee steamed behind the glass.
Somewhere, someone laughed too loudly.
The old man kept walking toward the shop,
carrying all his winters at once.-Mandy Ricks
In a square of sand beneath a watching sky,
two boys kneel while kingdoms cry.
Leo shapes with open hands, low, wide walls that welcome lands.
His gates unlatched, his edges kind—no need to guard what’s shared in mind.
Don cuts hard with heel and fist, a higher throne, a tighter grip.
His towers climb on narrowed ground, each grain a thing to stake and crown.
They do not speak. They do not meet.
Their borders press beneath their feet.
A restless wind that takes no side moves through their work, but passes by.
Leo mends the broken, and smiles as sand heals the fray.
Don strikes at every chance, even if it won’t give way.
And still they build, as children do—one builds for many, one for few.
-Mandy Ricks
Sometimes the day doesn’t arrive all at once.
It slips in quietly—through the edge of a curtain, the hum of something ordinary, the pause between thoughts.
I used to think I had to meet the day with intention, with purpose, with something to prove.
Now I’m learning to just notice it instead.
The way light rests on a surface.
The way a moment passes without asking anything from me.
Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe some days aren’t meant to be built or fixed or understood.
Maybe they’re just meant to be witnessed.
-Mandy Ricks
Mandy Ricks 