Palimpsest of Self

I have a scar shaped like the year I almost didn't make it,
a stomach that remembers every meal I was ashamed of,
a laugh that comes out wrong in quiet rooms,
too big, too sudden, like it forgot where it was.

Nobody put these in the catalog.

Nobody photographed the girl at 3 AM,
holding her own face in her hands,
like it was something she'd have to apologize for by morning.

But I have also stood in a hospital hallway
and watched a stranger cry
because someone let her cry.

No fixing.
No flinching.

Just being there.

And I have never seen anything so unbearably right.

I have watched my grandmother's hands, spotted and slow,
still find the exact rhythm of a song
older than the country we live in.

I have watched a dog choose me,
out of a whole shelter of better options,
simply choose me,
and lean the entire weight of itself
against my leg like a decision.

So who wrote the catalog?

Who stood at the beginning of everything
and said:

smooth counts,
symmetry counts,
a body arranged like it's asking permission counts,

and left out the dog leaning in,
the grandmother's hands,
the stranger's grief being witnessed instead of managed?

I think whoever made the actual list
made it out of what stays.

Not what photographs.

What stays.

The friend who sat with me
and said nothing useful, on purpose.

The version of my body that carried me through the worst year
and asked for nothing back
but food and rest.

The three seconds after someone says the true thing
and the room doesn't collapse.

I used to think beauty was a door
I hadn't found the key to.

Now I think I've been living in the house the whole time,
mistaking the drafty rooms,
the scar, the stomach, the too-loud laugh,
for reasons I didn't belong here.

When really, they were just proof

I was letting myself be lived in.