The Threshold of Dawn

Before the sun cracks the horizon, the sky softens to plum and pearl— that brief vocabulary only darkness remembers.

A bird calls. Its name is not in any language, only in the sharp angle of its wingbeat, the specific silver it cuts from the air.

Your shadow hasn't found you yet. For these minutes you are unmapped, untethered from the shape you wear by day.

Then gold threads the trees, and you begin— the small, inevitable architecture of becoming yourself again.