Rearranging

You arrive here not as a beginning—but as something rewritten by its own hands.

Your children have stepped out of your body into their own weather, calling you less, needing you in quieter ways—like a photograph still warm from the sun.

Your parents soften into time, their voices folding, their strength becoming memory while they are still standing.

And you—you are no longer who you were when everything required you.

Now, you require yourself. You move differently—with a kind of knowing that drips slowly from the center of your chest.

This is not loss.

This is space.

A clearing where your name sounds new again.

Your hands—once full of everyone—begin to open, and in that opening something wild and unrestrained begins to breathe.

You are not starting over.

You are rearranging—like light when it realizes it no longer has to prove its brightness.