The Shimmer

You stand in a room you've already left, watching light divide itself on glass, each prism holding a different afternoon.

Memory is not kind to sequence— it gathers moments like stones, polishes them into something sharper than their origin. The birthday cake tastes better now than it did then.

Your mother's voice arrives as weather, sudden and complete, moving through you the way wind moves through a song. You cannot hold it, only let it pass.

The body remembers in color: that blue meant longing, that green meant temporary, that gold meant you were certain of things you cannot now name.

Time doesn't heal so much as distance— the pain becomes a landscape you walk through with less stumbling each season, and eventually you stop checking to see if it's still there.