Uninvited

Daybreak arrives without asking.
Beauty catches me off guard again, the way it always does.
I watch the stillness inside the chaos.
The city wakes around me, indifferent, loud, alive.

Noise rises like vines on ruin.
I stand here, worn brick and ivy, holding my coffee with both hands.
Exhausted.
Still here.

There's a moth pressed against the glass.
Wings like tissue paper, like something that shouldn't survive the night.
It did.
I breathe that in.

Peace isn't a place I live.
It's a thing I find in the small hours, in the fragile and the fleeting.
A candle that refuses to go out.
A moth that made it to morning.

It's enough for now.
I'll hold this moment the way you hold something you know you'll lose.
Carefully.
With both hands.

--Vera