Light Sitting With You on the Floor

The afternoon stretches out, a long, flat road where the mask feels heaviest and the noise inside your chest demands to be heard. You lock the door.

You turn on the faucet. The water roars just loud enough to hide the sound of your body shaking apart, to drown out the sobs you cannot let the world hear.

In that steam-filled silence, you are not broken beyond repair; you are simply human, and the light is not offended by your trembling. It does not ask you to stop crying before it enters; it sits with you on the tile floor, right in the middle of the noise.

The water runs, but the light runs deeper, a spring welling up from within that no amount of shaking can extinguish. You do not have to compose yourself to be held.