The sky loosens its grip
Letting dusk spill like ink
Over the trembling rim of the world
Clouds drift
Slow
Swollen
As if carrying the weight
Of someone else’s sorrow
A hush gathers in the branches
A silver thin stillness
That tastes like the moment
Before a confession
Moisture beads
On the lip of the horizon
Hesitant
Shimmering
Soft spoken warning
That the atmosphere is remembering
Every ache it ever held
Then the first drop falls
A quiet punctuation
On the sentence I never finished
Another follows
And another
Until the sky is speaking fluently
In the language of unraveling
I stand beneath it
Letting the rain stitch itself
Into my skin
Letting the storm read me
Like an old diary
Left open on the wrong page
But when I lift my face
Expecting the familiar sting
I realize
The rain isn’t falling down anymore
It’s rising
Lifting from the ground
Like a thousand tiny ghosts
Returning to the clouds
That once released them
And for the first time
I understand
Not every storm comes to break me
Some come to take back
What was never mine to carry