Solace

The birds sing of Easter outside my door, trumpets of light for what is slowly beginning in me.

They don’t ask anything of me.. They just offer their sound to the morning, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to begin again.

So I started gathering.

Little things. Bent corners of poems. Strands of old moonlight caught in my hair. A song I heard once in a dream where no one had a face but everyone knew my name. A broken teacup that still smelled of cardamom.

Not treasures. Not even memories.

I haven’t spoken aloud since yesterday, and yet I feel spoken to. By the wind that slips between my collar and neck. By the kettle’s small sigh as it settles. By the touch of morning resting in the folds of the curtain.

I thought I’d been surviving the winter. But I see now I’d been carrying it. Tending to its weight as though it were mine to keep.

Now, the word has begun to soften.

I find myself opening doors, in case something is waiting something that enters only when the way is clear

I turn the books on my shelf so their spines face outward again. I stop hiding the mirror behind the door. I change myself into something quiet, something clean of memory, something that hasn’t yet held my sleep

Nothing is changing. Yet. But something is loosening. There is space where there was none. There is breath where stillness reigned.

In the kitchen, a single grape has rolled off the counter and come to rest against the baseboard. I don’t pick it up. It looks content. Everything does.

I’ve begun to hum again. Not songs I know. Just the sound of something moving through me that wants to be sound.

There are no signs. No meanings to make. But when the light moves across the floor, I follow it with my eyes as if it’s trying to show me something.

And it is.

Some days still feel cold, but it’s a different cold now the kind that reminds you how warm the body really is.

And I am beginning to bloom in places I didn’t know were soil.

I don’t need to understand it. I only need to stay close enough to keep feeling it happen.

Not all flowers open at once. Some bloom without anyone watching. Some take their time unfolding from the inside out.

Today, I walked barefoot across the kitchen tile. And when I reached the window, the sun met me there without ceremony.

I stood still. And it touched me as if I had never left.