Crease

You can no longer ask your grandmother, grandfather, or your great-grandmother for wisdom. They cannot tell you about life, feelings, and sounds now forgotten. However, you can ask their home.

Before it all began, there was this room, existing somewhere in the early moments, before the silver light of pre-dawn crept in. Light not coming from the sky, but from somewhere else. You haven’t yet worked out if this room is real or not, but you’ve returned to it so many times in your mind that its features are familiar; they’ve settled into you. There’s a flat table, a screen in the corner, just out of frame, and there’s a slight hum verging on a rumble you no longer notice. It all feels lived-in, known, warm.

This space is where the answers live. Sure, not marked, but certainly felt. Tracing a timeline that hasn’t fully been drawn. There’s no set path, but there is discernible progression. Or maybe layering. Either way, you can see it. You think of the weight of your hand on the table. Sometimes you imagine another presence. There’s no face, but the marks left on the table suggest a second hand, gently within yours.

This isn’t a starting point, but a recurrence. Leaving you remembering a different room, a different city, the hallway of a childhood home. You can recall how the evening sun would cast itself across the floor. How the carpet felt soft underfoot. You remember making your way down the hallway, circling back, never reaching the end. By now, the light has shifted, and the room has changed, but the hallway on the other side of the door remains. It no longer sits within a building, but in the softest part of you. Across that quiet space between people who never needed full sentences. It leaves you wondering if memory works backwards. Were the earliest parts of you made of moments, or sensations you learned to name later?

There’s still no discernible figure here, but there’s most certainly a presence. It’s not just of someone else, but of yourself – as you were, as you are now, and as you will be. It slowly emerged through fog resting above the river flats, or the morning light passing through the trees.

As the ambient light fades, that screen in the corner brightens. The light reveals a line beginning to form, and the gestures and marks on the table appear to you, this time more pronounced – quiet, weightless, imperfect. It leads you to feel something you don’t need to describe. You can’t, anyhow. You remain there and allow it to hold you.

You run your fingers across it without thought – a thread etched into your skin. Not tender, nor proud, just simply there. Kind of like it’s always been, or maybe not. You remember how this one came about; others, not as much. A fall from a bike, catching yourself on a wire fence, sex interrupting healing, a time when maybe more treatment and care should have been called upon. Whatever the cause, small, permanent evidence remains. You press against them sometimes to feel if they still respond. They don't. They stay – and through that they speak.

Since you could remember, you’d been told it was all about forgetting the pain, or at the very least sealing it off. Let it dry, crust over, become hard, fade away. But you’ve learned that healing doesn’t always mean vanishing. Sometimes it means making room for the mark, allowing it to move forward into the light. Sometimes the wound itself is not the problem, but the story surrounding it – what gets rethreaded, what gets buried, what boils over, or what is exposed only when you move a certain way, and the skin pulls taut.

You think of the way you’ve been taught to stand – with shoulders back, arms loose, face slack and unreadable. But you always felt most like yourself in moments of tension. A caught break, a nervous laugh, your hand gripping the pen too tightly. For you, it never arrived as a certainty. Instead, as a breach, this somehow made it feel all the more real. You didn’t become through a grand arrival, but by circling, through noticing what didn’t fit, and deciding to carry it anyway.

It’s there again – tracing along the most tender parts of your body. Across the corners of your joints, curving with your body like a signature. Not in a violent way, just something that is there, presenting itself as a symbol of what happens when softness resists disappearance. Run your hand over them again, and you’ll feel the grain. You picture someone else doing the same, not to ask what happened, just to recognise that something did.

Through the window, light breaks against the shape of something vast. A mountain, a tree older than your ancestors, your broadening shoulders. You remember the dull crack. The cold, hard ground. Saying to yourself, “Is this it?” You remember lying on manicured turf, your body stretched and chest alive, and the night sky lit up with your exhaled breath. In the silence of that moment, it felt like a quiet conversation between you, your body, and through your stubbornness, what you refuse to sacrifice and surrender. In acknowledgement of how far it’s brought you, in quiet resistance.

Look back at your reflection. Again, you notice the line, the bump, the scar. Not as flaws, not as badges. Just as reminders that you’ve felt deeply, and you’ve survived it. You press into it again and let the next moment, the next sensation come.

The moment that follows leaving isn’t exactly filled with silence, applause, or trumpets. Instead, it’s more the hush of something withdrawn, paused mid-sentence. Like that fraction of a moment as you wait in suspension for the camera shutter to close.

Each morning, the light arrives distinctively; longer, slower, thinner at the edges. Still to your right, but dappled in an entirely different way. It catches the dust in a new language, giving shape to an unfamiliar space. Within this new rhythm, you move with care, walking more softly, listening more intently, and speaking less. None of this comes out of fear, but out of reverence and respect for that space you occupy in between.

You catch your reflection as you pass. Not clearly, but just enough to recall a shape. It appears there too – half-evident in the glass. Pause. Look. Copper has been replaced with silver. Yet it’s something that suggests a before.

It’s not exactly longing. It’s more reaching. Laughter coming from the kitchen, the texture of a friend's jacket brushing you, the warmth left in a seat just vacated. You carry these as one might carry scent, as something intangible, persistent, utterly transporting. None of these anchors or grounds you; instead, they flicker and burn slowly.

You write emails, you lace your boots. You buy fruit from someone whose voice you haven’t memorised yet. The changing of the seasons smells different this time around. All the while, it’s still there, resting somewhere between belonging and meaning. Not imposing, not interrupting, but nonetheless, you notice it. It’s stitched into the soft fabric of each day.

The frame doesn’t fit as it used to, but you’re learning to exist within it. To stretch without breaking, without hurting. To recognise that the view out the window is also the view inwards. That distance is not always lost; sometimes it's just taking what is known and simply rearranging it.

It is in that soft rearrangement that something settles within you. It’s not certainty, just a little more clarity, existing as a thin thread that glints as it crosses the light of the morning sun.

You can tell yourself the line ahead is straight and narrow. From where you stand, however, everything is a little bent. Edges curl, things warp a little. Filled with uncertainty, your legs sometimes shaking, you still try to follow that line.

Days are getting longer and noticeably more layered now. Some clean, others cave in on you without warning. Leaving marks in places you didn’t think were exposed. Then there are the days that vanish entirely – hiding between one moment and the next, almost as if someone stuffed them in a hidden pocket for safekeeping.

Move through it all with the composure you’ve been told is strange. Not detached, not fully inside it either. More like walking through a room where everything is in slow motion. Feel the shifts against your body, movements behind your shoulders, every single little sound. You’ve ridden this wave plenty of times before.

There is something steadying about not yet knowing. It’s like a fragile stillness, like watching a landscape you haven’t reached from a distance you can’t immediately bridge. You don’t see the details – only silhouettes, soft gradients, ideas of where light might land if it were only given the chance.

Sometimes that’s enough. Other times, the horizon sharpens suddenly, and you feel something close. Almost as if a future you haven’t earned is standing just behind a door left slightly ajar. The brightness behind it feels intentional and inviting. But then there are moments when it disappears again, dispersing into the atmosphere. No trace, no mark, only the faint reminder that something was there a moment or two ago, but not anymore. The mind learns to live with this constant disappearing act. The heart doesn’t. So you keep walking anyway. Quietly and deliberately. Gathering small pieces: a half-memory, a moment you’re not sure happened the way you remember. Not to come to an answer, but to understand the wanting that remains after the moment passes.

Clarity, you realise, is not the clean line people imagine it to be. More often than not, it’s a series. Sometimes it leads you to feel close to something like resolve. A softness in your chest, a quiet not settling your stomach. Both feelings follow their own path, defying orders. There’s no choice but to live with them.

Truth is, you’re not waiting for the future to reveal itself. Instead, you are learning to see the present without the need to make it final. Continue moving gently, steadily. Bring together all those scattered lines. Smooth them out without forcing it. Again, not to find the answer, but to recognise the horizon when it alights once more.

It’s not there as something certain, or as closure, but as a reminder that even something unfinished has its own type of clarity. You just have to let it be.

There are moments when you feel scattered in a way that cannot be blamed on anything other than quiet honesty, and of becoming. Think about these pieces not as debris, but rather small, persistent truths that refuse to disperse.

Think of a note in front of you. Scrunched and torn. Edges rough, with a message written, too raw to be held. There’s a regret that arrives afterwards. Even when it’s been flattened out again, the creases and folds remain.

Imagine trying to realign it all. Not to restore the message, but to understand why you even scrunched and tore it in the first place. That’s where you begin – with the admission it wasn’t an accident.

Some of those pieces return on their own, resting in a recognisable place. Others, however, require something more deliberate, like picking up what was once dropped or set down because it felt too heavy. Too bright, or too exposing. These pieces are in disarray.

But this isn’t about completion. Instead, it’s about feeling each individual part and letting it connect to the next. Recognising that the pieces were never fully separate, only resting at a safe distance until you were ready. There’s something in that – a kind of interior tension that exists between wanting and withholding. Steadfastly. It’s fear, and the instinct to move closer. To touch the stove, expose yourself, just to see how it feels. It’s a bracing in your throat, a lift in your chest like you’re about to pick up your pace to run. Your body always knows before the mind cares to admit.

Don’t recentre yourself for the sake of coherence, but for truth. Step forward with surety and complete openness. Old skin and defences shed, no more shrinking. The pieces now gathered carry the weight of what was no longer needed, instead of what you wanted. They point towards something that is neither a person nor a destination, but a place that feels certain.

Gather. Rally towards recognition. The kind that starts from within and extends outwards like the first kiss of the morning sun, tracing the outlines of the day without demanding a single thing in return. Gather. Build towards desire. Not the explosive kind, that’s never been you. The steady. The kind that deepens rather than burns. Gather. Shift toward the possibility of the open page, the crease that guides your fold, the signal that there is surely more to come.

It’s not complete. Nothing needs to be, nor will it ever be. However, for now, the pieces are together again; that is enough.