The One That Is This

I remember the nail first –
not the door,
not the house,
just the way it caught the light
like it had swallowed something unspeakable
and was still holding it in.
Crooked.
Like it had been hammered in anger,
or by a child,
or by someone who didn’t want to be remembered.

That was the beginning.
Not of everything,
but of me noticing the shape of what doesn’t fit.
What refuses to fit.

There’s a light –
not holy, not divine,
not the kind you chase or bottle for winter  –
but a light that burns
in a shape that has only ever been
itself.

It isn’t essence.
It isn’t type.
It isn’t “tree” or “door” or “man.”
I tried those words.
They tasted like dust.

It’s the bark I pressed my cheek against
that one October
when my mother was inside
screaming into a pillow
so no one would know.
It’s the angle the sun took
when it didn’t ask
if I was ready to see clearly.

It’s how her voice broke
on my name –
not every time,
just once –
like a crack in a window
that you don’t notice
until it starts leaking cold
in the dead of March.

They tried to teach me.
They brought diagrams,
terms,
philosophies that sliced the world
into categories
and told me:
this is real,
this is not.

But the real thing  –
the this of it  –
never made it onto their charts.
Because it bled.
Because it bruised.
Because it curled up under a hedge
behind my childhood house
and wept like something
that didn’t know it was allowed to.

I learned not to say “thing.”
Too big.
Too empty.
It made what mattered flinch –
like it had been seen
by someone who wasn’t worthy.

So I stopped using names.
Stopped trying to trap the world
inside a box
and carry it home.

I remembered instead –
the man who looked at me
only once,
and never again.
The flame that stole my name
and carried it backward
through drifts of silent snow
until no one could find it anymore.

These were not metaphors.
They were not ideas.
They were not symbols to decode.

They were real.
They are real.

You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?
That pulse at the edge
of speech.
That hum
that doesn’t match the rhythm
of anyone else’s breath.
That thereness
you can’t hold
without losing it.

And you know –
you do –
that the end will not come
in fire or frost
or any of the endings
we’ve rehearsed so cleanly.

It will come
the moment we forget
what it meant
for something –
anything –
to be this.

This bark.
This crack.
This nail.
This voice.
This silence.
This flame.

This you.