Dust and Light

The afternoon enters sideways, through the crack where no one thinks to look. Old books breathe on the shelf, their spines worn bright by hands that loved them into dissolution.

A door hangs open in my chest— not from breaking, but from use, from seasons of coming and going, from the hinge learning its own music in the space between locked and free.

The dust that settles is patient. It knows all names eventually, knows the shape of every silhouette, the color of forgetting, the weight of light when nothing else is listening.

I collect these moments like shells, not for their perfection but their edges— smooth where the ocean has been kind, sharp where it has been honest. This is how we become ourselves.

The answer waits in the silence between heartbeats, patient as roots, growing toward something we've forgotten how to name. But the light remembers. The light remembers everything.