They smell like a wound drizzled by morning rain like dust lifting softly from pavement after weather like roses still carrying the cold breath of dawn
Not unpleasant
Just painfully alive
Ancient somehow
As though feathers preserve memories the body spends years trying to outlive
Strange how scent reaches the soul before thought does
One breath and suddenly the past becomes physical again
The ache gathering beneath the ribs the overwhelming feeling of having lost something beautiful long ago
That invisible meeting place between longing and recognition
The way certain scents return us not only to people but to former versions of ourselves
Softer selves unguarded ones the selves that still believed tenderness could exist without disappearance attached to it
And perhaps that is why birds unsettle me
Because when they cross the evening sky carrying the fragrance of rain and distance and earth something inside me rises toward them instinctively
Not joy exactly not sorrow either
But the unbearable remembrance of who I was before longing became part of my nature
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.
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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