The Light Remembers The Hold

The morning light hits the kitchen table, and you are performing okayness for the world to see. You smile at the cereal bowl, but your body is braced for a impact that isn't coming.

When your child reaches for your hand, you flinch—a sudden, sharp recoil before you can stop it. Your muscles remember a different story, one where love meant pulling away, where the hand that should have held you instead let go.

That ghost lives in your nerves, whispering that you are still the one who gets dropped. But look at your own hand now, open and waiting.

The light inside you is not that old absence. It is the presence that stayed.

You are not the child who was left; you are the parent who remains. The chain breaks not when you stop feeling the fear, but when you let your hand stay open despite it.

The past remembers the rejection, but the light remembers the hold.