The Anatomy of a Collapse

I found this screenshot buried in my camera roll the other day.

A forgotten image from 2020—one I never took, never saw, and never stood in the exact position to witness.

Seeing it now stopped me.

Not because of the destruction—I lived that.

But because the angle wasn’t mine.

Someone else stood on the collapsed remains of my family’s store.

On top of broken shelves and twisted beams, decades of equipment, scattered products, and the remnants of a life that shaped me.

Their feet were on over a century of my family’s work, and their lens documented a viewpoint I never saw.

From this vantage point, the ending is unmistakable.

The roof beams gape open.

Ceiling tiles hang like thoughts slipping from their hinges.

Food products spill across the floor in a kind of chaotic confession.

And still, some shelves cling to their rows of paper products and canned goods, as if refusing to accept what already happened.

This is what a visible ending looks like.

Messy.

Harsh.

Public.

Undeniable.

In 2020, the world could see the collapse.

Anyone could drive by and understand that something enormous had been lost.

The ending had form, shape, debris, and a footprint you could stand on.

But this year…this year has been a different kind of devastation.

My father died.

The ground under my family, my history, and my identity shifted in ways no landslide ever could.

My relationship—with all its rituals, illusions, hopes, and unspoken truths—exploded in my hands.

Not because of one moment, but because the reality beneath it finally gave way.

And unlike the store, there was no dramatic photo to show the collapse.

No debris field.

No image to capture the exact moment the life I thought I had fell apart.

Leadership brought its own tremors—public scrutiny, expectations, decisions that carried weight I felt in my bones.

Fire after fire after fire.

Some external.

Most internal.

And unlike the loss of Tatsuda’s, none of these collapses were visible from the outside.

No one could stand above them and take a picture.

No one could diagram the damage.

No one could point to the exposed beams of my heart or the scattered pieces of my trust.

What I endured this year happened quietly, privately, inside the architecture of my own life.

And yet—the truth is the same:

Endings have an anatomy, even when no one else can see them.

There are the beams that give way.

The parts that hold long after they should.

The pieces that scatter.

The pieces that stay intact.

The strange, painful order inside the chaos.

And just like in that photo, by the time I was able to truly look…the collapse had already happened.

But here is what I know now, standing in the woman I have become:

Some endings are the kind that split your life open.

Some endings are the kind that sharpen you.

And some endings—especially the invisible ones—are the kind that reorder you from the inside out.

And we get to choose the meaning we give them

and who we will allow ourselves to become on the other side.

Because endings don’t define us.

What we make of them does.

And somewhere between what was taken from me

and who I am now,

I can finally see that both collapses—

the one the world witnessed

and the ones only I felt—

were not just endings.

They were the collapses that forced me to rebuild

into someone I never imagined—

and now wouldn’t trade.