Before the Light Breaks

The house holds its breath before the sun finds the window. Dust hangs like suspended time, each particle a small hesitation.

I've learned to love these minutes— the ones that belong to no one, where shadows haven't quite remembered what they're supposed to be.

Outside, the world is rehearsing. The birds know something I don't, their calls arriving from the dark like letters from a country I've never visited.

My hands remember sleep. The coffee steam rises and dissolves, indistinguishable from the air that holds it, until the moment it isn't.

This is how change comes— not in thunder, but in the soft rearrangement of light across a wall, and the terrible, quiet knowledge that I saw it.