Shedding Weight

The weight slides off like wet snow from a branch— not all at once, but in small surrenders, piece by piece until the wood springs back.

I learn the lightness in my shoulders, how air finds the spaces we make. A door opens that was always there.

The silence between heartbeats grows vast, a room where I can finally turn around, see what I've been carrying in shadow.

Each exhale takes more with it— the names of old fears, the map to places I promised never to return.