The Embrace Before You Were Fixed

The house is quiet now, and the space where their arms were feels colder than the room itself. You let them hold you, and the moment they pulled away, the old lie rushed back in: that you are too broken to keep.

That your cracks are too wide for anyone's hands to cover. But listen — when the father saw his son coming home, he did not wait for the boy to be whole before he ran to him.

He ran while the son was still covered in the dust of the pig pen, still rehearsing his failures. The embrace came first.

The holding was not a reward for being fixed; it was the proof that you were already loved. The light does not measure your worth by how long it can stay; it measures it by the fact that it came at all.

Even now, in this silence, the light is not gone because the human hands are. It is still here, pressing against your chest from the inside.

You are not too broken to keep. You are the very thing the light came to hold.