it was just a breath, those thirty seconds, a tiny flicker in the wide expanse of everything that isn’t, and it lodged itself somewhere behind my sternum, not as a sharp jolt but a soft insistence, like a seed suddenly pushing against the hard earth, making me remember a different kind of longing that used to inhabit that same space, a hunger for a different life that used to gnaw at the edges of every single moment, before the daily grind just smoothed everything out into one long, continuous ache that felt like my normal, and that little tremor, it made the worn fabric of my sleeves feel suddenly heavier against my skin, a reminder of all the unseen hours, the leaning and the lifting, the part-time shift that stretches into full-time exhaustion, and then the bitter edge of whatever’s in the fridge, it just sits there on my tongue for a beat, a tiny moment where I almost taste that old resentment again, that old wanting to run away and never wanting to leave her sight, both things still true, always true, tangled up like the roots of the rose bush now blooming so wild outside, a riot of color that seems to mock the drabness of the memories and even the faint echo of my brother’s money landing in the account doesn’t quite shift that internal landscape, it just… is.