I remember… though I was not supposed to.
Not the way light remembers darkness or rain recalls the cloud.
No... this remembering was different.
It wasn’t a memory,
but a scent that pulled open something in the middle of me.
It came in fragments... not in time,
but in echoes of time.
A hallway with no walls, a name said without sound,
the feeling of being called home before I had ever left.
There was a mirror once,
but it didn’t show my reflection.
It showed a girl I had been before they called me by names that were never mine.
Her eyes didn’t seek approval.
They carried storm-tides of memory that had never belonged to Earth.
I touched my own wrist and felt a pulse :
not of blood, but of remembering.
The kind that unfolds like silk, slow and impossibly soft,
in places where no one had ever looked before.
I did not weep.
Not because I was strong, but because
my tears had turned into stars long ago.
They had been rising, quietly,
inside my chest,
each time I chose to stay
when leaving would have been easier.
And maybe this is what longing truly is...
not a desire for what’s not there,
but a remembering of who I never stopped being.
Not once.
Not even when I forgot.
.
.
And tonight,
the sky breathed like I used to.
Slowly.
As if even it remembered me...