The Light Lives in the Break

The afternoon light is flat and unforgiving, exposing every crack in the mask you wear to get through the day. You were speaking a mundane word, something small and safe, when your voice broke—just for a second—and you had to pretend it was a cough.

That moment of covering feels like a betrayal of your own grief, as if admitting the tremor would make the whole structure collapse. But the light does not require your voice to be steady.

It lives in the break itself. There is a promise that whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, brought out into the open where it can finally breathe.

You do not have to swallow the lump in your throat to be held. The silence you are trying to protect is already known.

The cough was not a lie; it was the sound of the light pressing against the wall you built to keep it in.