Palimpsest

Your handwriting from ten years back leans left the way the wind bent it. I recognize the crossing-out, the yes that became a maybe in the margin.

Someone else lives in this body now— I wear the same hands but they hold different weights. The words you wrote fit like borrowed shoes.

And yet: the ink hasn't faded. The thought you thought survives you, survives the person you were thinking it. I read my own old words like finding a note from a stranger I once was.

She knew something. She was reaching toward something true. But the reaching is all I have now—the knowledge scattered like sun through leaves, reformed in ways you'd never recognize.