The Light Meets You in Wreckage

The house is quiet now, but that one sentence keeps playing on a loop in your head. You hear the exact moment your voice cracked, the split second where the mask slipped and the trembling got out.

You wish you could reach back into the dark and pull the words out of the air before they landed. But the light does not ask you to edit your history.

It meets you in the wreckage of the thing you cannot take back. There was a man born blind, and the people asked whose fault it was—his or his parents'.

The light said: neither. The brokenness was not a punishment.

It was a canvas. Your cracked voice is not evidence that you failed.

It is the place where the real work begins. A bruised reed the light will not break.

A smoldering wick it will not snuff out. You are not disqualified by the tremor.

You are held specifically because of it.