Another day. Now
...
I woke up earlier than I needed to.
Not suddenly, not with any sense of urgency —
just awake, in the way you are
when something has already started moving.
The light was doing what it always does at that hour.
Nothing remarkable.
I kept checking whether it felt different —
as if it might confirm that something had shifted,
or hadn’t,
or was about to.
It didn’t.
Just light,
coming in at an angle
I’d stood in a hundred times before.
I stood there longer than necessary,
holding nothing in particular.
Waiting,
without being able to say for what.
That was new.
Or maybe it wasn’t —
maybe I’d just got better
at noticing the gap
where an explanation usually goes.
What stayed with me wasn’t an image
or a moment I could replay cleanly.
It was more like a gap.
Small.
Persistent.
The sense that some internal setting
had been adjusted overnight
and hadn’t been reset —
the way your posture compensates for an ache
before you’ve consciously registered pain.
At one point I realised
I was moving more carefully than usual.
Not cautiously —
that’s different —
but deliberately,
as though I’d already learned something
I didn’t yet have words for,
and didn’t want to test
how fragile it might be
by naming it too soon.
There’s a particular kind of quiet
that follows restraint.
Not relief.
Not disappointment.
Just the absence of tension
doing work
you only notice once it stops.
I hadn’t expected that part
to cost anything.
I hadn’t expected it to linger
in the way I reached,
paused,
adjusted,
and then reached again.
I told myself
this was nothing I needed to resolve.
That it would settle
once the day took hold properly.
I really did.
And maybe it will.
Or maybe this is just
what it feels like
when the body has already accepted a direction
and the mind is still pretending
it’s a discussion.
Either way, I kept going.
Which felt like a choice,
though I couldn’t have said
between what
ㅤㅤ
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Other prose and poems.
Nothing truly leaves — it just changes how it stays.
If something moved in you — a silence that whispered — I’d love to hear it below, or in my DM’s.
All artwork courtesy of NDjin Gallery
That moment when waking up too early in the morning brings this quietness that feels unusual … these words resonated … 😊
After reading this piece, I was struck by your acute attention to ordinary moments. Nothing dramatic happens, yet there is a subtle shift in the inner self — the sense that the body has already accepted a direction while the mind still pretends it has a choice. It reminded me that the most significant changes in life often reside in the small, everyday moments.