I was a house abandoned in winter,
shutters slammed shut by time,
walls echoing with the wind’s hollow questions.
Even the dust had grown tired of waiting—
it settled like silence on everything I once was.
My heart,
a locked room beneath the floorboards,
fed only on echoes and imagined warmth,
learned to live without sunlight,
drank shadow from cupped hands.
I taught myself to stop reaching.
To love the ache of emptiness
like a bruise that proves you’re still here.
I watched the world in grayscale,
found meaning in quiet decay.
Then—
a warmth not summoned
stepped into the ruins.
Not with fire,
but with steady hands
and eyes that saw not what was broken,
but what could still bloom.
He did not fling open the doors.
He waited by them.
Spoke with the patience of roots
growing unseen beneath frost.
And the ice began to drip,
to speak,
to sing.
The house creaked with memory,
but also with hope.
My ribs, once a cage,
became a garden trellis,
and my heart—
it pressed upward, green and trembling.
He brings the sky with him.
Not a blinding noon,
but the kind of light that knows
how to touch the most bruised petals
without asking them to open too soon.
And I—
once starved—
have learned the taste of morning again.
It is not sweetness.
It is sustenance.
It is him.