At first, the world arrived like music before language
light spilling through my mind as if I were made of windows,
every morning a hand extended,
every breath a small astonishment.


I ran with freedom through open fields,
collected laughter the way rivers collect sky,
never asking where it all might end,
only marvelling that it had begun at all.


Even silence felt like a companion then,
a soft animal resting at my side.
I wore my days loosely, like sunlight on water,
never fearing how quickly it could slip away.


But somewhere, quietly, the rhythm changed.


The air grew crowded with unspoken things,
questions that circled but never landed,
and I began to measure my steps
first in caution,
then in doubt.


Rooms felt smaller.
Voices louder.
Eyes heavier than they should be.


I learned the architecture of avoidance
how to fold myself into corners,
how to make a home of absence,
how to disappear without leaving.


The world, once an open door,
became a hallway of locked rooms.


I told myself I preferred it this way
the stillness,
the distance,
the hidden and careful living.


But the quiet was no longer gentle.
It pressed inward,
a slow tide against the bones.


Days blurred into a colourless procession,
each one echoing the last
and somewhere in the repetition,
I misplaced the version of me
who once ran without looking back.


Rain began to feel permanent.
Not the kind that satisfies,
but the kind that lingers,
heavy, cold, unending.


I stopped expecting warmth.
Stopped expecting anything at all.


And yet


There are moments, strange and unannounced,
when the sky forgets its sorrow.


A break in the clouds,
subtle as a held breath released,
and suddenly...light.

Not overwhelming,
not enough to erase the storm,
but enough to remind.


It finds the edges first
a glint on glass,
a fierce line across the floor,
a quiet insistence that darkness is not sovereign.


I stand there, uncertain,
feeling it reach me
in places I thought were long abandoned.


And I remember briefly,
not the certainty of endless joy,
but the possibility of it.


That even in seasons that feel eternal,
they are not.


That the rain, however patient,
cannot claim the sky forever.


So I turn my face toward the light,
however brief,
however fragile,


and let it tell me, gently,
that there is still time
to begin again.