The Light Meets You Unfinished

The afternoon light is unforgiving. It exposes the dust on the shelves and the fatigue in your bones.

You catch yourself editing a text message, stripping out the sadness, the doubt, the raw ache, until only a polished 'I'm fine' remains. You hit send.

The mask holds. But the light does not need your performance.

It is already present in the mundane middle of your day, seeing the words you deleted before anyone else could. There is a father who saw his son coming home from a long way off.

He ran. Before the apology, before the speech — he ran.

The light does not wait for you to clean up the draft. It meets you in the unfinished sentence.

You are not required to be bright to be held. The struggle is not that you are hiding.

The struggle is believing you must.