A New Blossom

I wake now to a morning that does not ask who I am becoming. The light comes through the same window where I once sat counting the hours until their return, but the light is different now. Softer. It does not demand that I be anything. It simply falls, and I lie within it, letting it warm the spaces that grief had hollowed out.

There is a garden I have been tending since the spring of my unmaking. I did not plant it with intention. I merely began to dig, one anguished afternoon, my hands needing a task that would not wound me further. The soil was cold and reluctant, and I remember thinking, *this is what my chest feels like*. Hard-packed. Stubborn. Full of roots that were not mine.

But I kept digging.