i remember

• i remember how the morning learned a different shape when she was awake before me.
• i miss being called to the table by a voice that made the day feel harmless.
• i still carry the warmth of her arms as if protection had been given a body.
• i remember the songs she listened to — even the ones i did not yet know were becoming memory.
• i miss being received, plainly, into the day. no instructions. only a chair pulled out.
• i still carry the quiet certainty that one room, somewhere, always belonged to me.

breakfast

Breakfast was never only food. It was proof that someone had thought of me before I had finished arriving.

There was always something already on the table, and the small noises of a kitchen that had been awake before me — a pan settling, a spoon meeting a cup, a chair turned slightly toward the door.

She would say my name the way people say a small good news.

her arms

Her hugs were not theatrical. Shoulder, fabric, the slow press of a hand on the back of my head. The world would briefly stop insisting. Fear, when it existed, learned to wait outside.

I remember the warmth of her shirt more clearly than most things I have written down.

the songs

A song can become a room, a smell, a time of day — a person returning for a few minutes without warning.

There was always music coming from another room, low enough to feel like company. The radio stayed on, almost as a habit of the house.

protection

She did not promise the world would behave. She only made it less sharp.

A kitchen. A cup. A chair. A voice from another room asking whether I had eaten. Small, ordinary objects with the strange authority to keep fear quiet for a while.

I did not know, then, that being watched over the ordinary things was its own kind of love.

i do not romanticize

I do not need to turn every memory into perfection to know it was love. There were ordinary days, tired days, days where nothing soft was said. They count too.

what remains

• her way of receiving people.
• the memory of her voice.
• the shelter of her hug.
• the songs she did not know I was learning.
• the breakfast mornings.
• the feeling of being protected.

Some mornings still arrive wearing her voice.