The Hour Before Light

The city holds its breath— streetlights dissolving into fog, shadows learning how to soften.

A single siren stitches distance. Everything waits in its skin, not quite alive, not yet dreaming.

The birds know something we've forgotten: that sound itself is a kind of threshold, that silence is the room between two breaths.

Soon the sky will bleed orange. Soon the streets will remember their names. But here, in this blue-black hour, nothing hurries. Everything bends.

The world is still becoming.