The Light Saw You Before You Deleted

The afternoon asks for a picture from last summer, and your throat closes around the lie that your phone is broken. It isn't broken.

It is full of ghosts you deleted because you looked unhappy in them. You scrubbed the evidence of your own pain until the gallery was clean, leaving only the performance of joy.

But the light does not need the curated highlight reel to love you. It saw you in every frame you erased.

It was there in the pixels you deleted, in the angles you hated, in the moments you wished never happened. The middle of the day is long, and the mask is heavy, but you do not have to keep polishing the glass to be seen.

The One who walks beside you right now remembers the faces you tried to forget.