Le Meilleur Sentiment

And then, when I stepped outside today,

the world had been rewritten.

They warned me it would feel like this,

the old stories, the lost epics,

the weeping of sailors and saints.

The Flying Dutchman, adrift in endless time.

Senta’s vigil, alone by wild seas.

The storm. The salvation.

The weight of something too immense to name.

I thought I knew it all.

I thought I’d glimpsed it,

in the ink-streaked pages I wrote in the dead of night,

in the spaces between violin notes,

in the shadows that lingered just beyond the dream’s reach.

I had shaped it with hunger, with longing.

I’d made an altar of it in my mind,

where I wept in silence.

But then I stepped outside today.

And the trees were speaking in a language I could not understand,

soft and wind-ensnared, green beyond reason.

The pine reached through my ribs,

the moss crept beneath my skin.

The breeze carried a scent I knew,

I breathed it in, and it tasted like memory.

The sky, so dizzying in its blue.

The sun on my face like a benediction,

like a hand I'd waited lifetimes to hold.

In an instant, I saw colors that did not belong to this world,

emanating from tears from beyond.

spilling like tears from some divine wound.

Every leaf sang in gold and green and velvet.

Every shadow pulsed with light.

The wind murmured a name I didn’t know I’d forgotten.

I’d written this, a thousand times.

I thought I understood it all,

the words, the ache, the longing.

But it wasn’t until now

that I knew the truth.

I never understood.

Not until now.

That love, when it finally arrives,

doesn’t knock,

it erupts.

It remakes you.

Everything is brighter.

Lighter.

Stranger, softer.

It moves around me, through me,

as though it knows I’ve been waiting forever.

Like fire,

like a secret too tender to survive the telling.

The world is unfolding around me,

petal by petal, flame by flame,

and I am seeing it all

for the first time.

And still,

this is only the beginning.

The flickering light at the edge of everything,

calling me home.