The Girl in the Margins

I open the spine and find you again— ink-blotted girl with sky-wide dreams, your laughter pressed between lines, your grief hidden in margins. You speak in loops and loops of hope, believing love could rewrite the world, believing you could become someone by simply wanting it badly enough. I know your handwriting like a ghost knows the house it once lived in— familiar, sacred, aching to be touched, but untouchable now. You don’t see me watching you. Older. Wiser. Wounded, too. You walk through those words with stars in your pockets, and I want to warn you— but the past is deaf and I am only a visitor. Still, I read you like scripture, not to relive you, but to remember how it felt to believe in becoming— because that young girl who wrote in this old journal; I know her, but she doesn’t know me.