Clouds are born from what cannot be seen. Water vapor, so ordinary it slips through fingers, rises, cools, and condenses into something strangely visible, something that can be pointed at and named. They are made of countless small things agreeing to become something larger than themselves. They are always in motion even when they appear still. They are shaped not by their own will, but by the pressures, temperatures, and winds around them. Formed from invisible interior weather, composed of many small truths, always changing in ways the eye can’t quite track, responsive to the world rather than armored against it. Someone to look up to.

I have not been very good at that kind of change. I have been a cumulonimbus when a thin cirrus would have been kinder. I have brought storms into rooms that only asked for shade. I want to apologize for remaining the same person all these years, for walking into new moments wearing an old emotional coat that no longer fits the weather. I kept showing up dense, saturated, ready to rain, when what was needed was lightness. Just a veil between the sun and someone’s face.

Clouds don’t cling to one shape. They rise because warm air is less dense than cold, because something inside them believes it can be lighter. They expand when pressure drops, relax into new contours, drift into whatever space opens. I envy that physics. I envy how a cloud is allowed to be responsive without being accused of being fake. When it changes, no one calls it inconsistent. They call it a sky.

I have been called stubborn, intense, too much. I have been a weather pattern people learned to brace for. And I understand why. I kept condensing the same old grief, the same old fears, into the same heavy formations. I kept raining out of habit. I am sorry for that, for mistaking emotional gravity for authenticity, for thinking that being real meant being immutable.

A cloud forms when rising air cools to its dew point, when the invisible finally cannot stay invisible anymore. Something has to give. Droplets gather around tiny particles, such as dust, salt, smoke, and a nuclei of imperfection that make becoming possible. That feels like a confession about being human. We don’t become ourselves in pure air; we need the grit of accountability, the specks of hurt, the strange debris of living. I have those nuclei in me too. I just kept building the same cloud around them.

I want to feel the pressure change and not panic. To let new air in. To thin out when the room needs light. I want to grow tall and dramatic only when the sky is ready for thunder. Mostly, I want to drift—to trust that I do not have to be anchored to who I was five heartbreaks ago.

Clouds are temporary by design. Even the largest anvil of a storm will eventually dissipate, break into wisps, fall back to earth as rain and start the cycle over. There is no shame in that return. There is nourishment in it. What if I could believe that about myself? That letting parts of me fall away is not a failure, but a way of feeding whatever comes next.

I have been afraid that if I change, I will lose the only proof I have that I existed. The hurt has felt like my only solid shape. But clouds prove that form does not equal essence. A cirrus and a thunderhead are both water. A mist and a monsoon are made of the same quiet molecules. I am still me even when I soften. I am still true even when I rearrange.

So this is me, standing under my own internal sky, practicing a new weather, trying how to be porous. Being a cloud means to let warmth lift me instead of insisting on my weight. If I arrive somewhere different than I used to, it is not because I am pretending.

I didn’t know how to thin myself then. I didn’t know I was allowed to.

Look up and even now something is shifting. A breeze you can’t see is rearranging me. I am becoming a new outline against the blue, still made of all the same water, but no longer insisting on the same old storm.