The attic kept a winter smell of pennies, dust, and thread.
I climbed there often as a child and named the dark instead.

A girl can build a hundred rooms from cardboard, tape, and string,
then wait beside the doorway for the sound of someone seeing.

I carried home my drawings curled inside a rubber band.
The corners softened in my grip. The graphite marked my hand.

By now I know what certain things were fashioned to contain:
a cupboard takes the weight of plates,
a gutter gathers rain.

A mirror holds a borrowed face.
A church collects a prayer.
A daughter stands with something made
and learns to leave it there.

Years folded into other years. I rented keys and views.
I learned the smell of fresh-cut wood and how to tighten screws.

I learned which floorboards gave themselves away beneath a shoe.
I learned how silence changes shape when it belongs to you.

37 now, I watched one dusk through streaks of kitchen light,
a woman teaching her young son to ride a bike that night.

The boy kept finding every ditch. The front wheel kissed the ground.
Each failure seemed to lift her eyes as though she’d heard a sound.

Not triumph. Not arrival. Nothing polished, grand, or rare.
just seeing him attempt the thing and being glad he dared.

The chain slipped loose and it turned sideways with a scrape.
The mother brushed his hair back from his flushed-out face.

He grinned despite the bloodied knee. The evening settled blue.
I stood there with a drying glass and somehow knew I knew.

Later, washing dishes, I dropped a glass and watched it break.
The crack ran through it like a path a river starts to make.

I threw it out and for months I reached toward where it used to stay,
my hand arriving at the shelf before my mind could say.

There must exist another life, misfiled somewhere from mine,
where someone looked up from a chair at exactly the right time.

Where I came through the doorway, heart drumming in my chest,
holding out the thing I’d made, still warm from its unrest.

And something passed between us then, wordless as evening dew.
Not a medal, not a verdict, just the knowledge that it grew

Beneath my hands and someone saw it before the picture frays
I keep returning to that room, though it gives back only haze.

I’ve furnished every inch of it and did the best I could.
My mind loved me when no one and nothing else would.