The Hour Before Light

The dark is not absence but a held breath— faint shapes gathering in the corner where sleep loses its purchase, where dreams fold into morning.

Outside, the birds know something we don't, their small insistence building like water against the dam of night. One note, then another, then a conversation we cannot translate but understand completely.

The world is still changing in all the places we cannot see, roots deepening, frost melting from stone, the small deaths of stars we'll never witness.

When light arrives, it will seem sudden. But it has been coming all along—patient, inevitable, like every true thing, like the way we learn to live with loss.