There is a box
somewhere between my ribs and my spine,
lined with mismatched echoes
and the dust of old goodbyes.

It hums.
Sometimes soft like a lullaby,
sometimes jagged like teeth on broken glass.

Inside,
fragments of faces blur at the edges,
voices tangle like necklace chains,
laughter curls into the shape of wings.
I do not know where they begin
or where I end.

You see,
I have been collecting people my whole life
their gestures,
their grief,
their galaxies.
They leave fingerprints on my soul
and do not ask for them back.

Sometimes,
pieces scatter.
A childhood smell slips away,
the curve of a loved one’s handwriting fades.
Loss is not a clean break
it is a slow unravelling,
thread by thread,
until you mistake the empty spaces
for who you are.

But then someone laughs,
and you recognise the sound.
A stranger touches your shoulder,
and it feels like home.
And suddenly,
you are stitched back together
with someone else’s thread.

Perhaps we are all just
lost-and-found boxes,
half-forgetting, half-remembering,
made of borrowed stories
and broken clocks,
shining only because
so many people
have left their light inside us.

And when I say I love you,
what I mean is:
take this piece of me
and keep it safe.

Because maybe the truest thing about me
is that I am not mine alone
I am everyone I have ever loved,
and everyone who has ever dared
to love me back.