For the woman who has almost arrived.

She has always been the one who holds.

Holds the room before anyone notices it needs holding. Holds the feeling no one else knows how to name. Holds her breath, sometimes, without knowing she is doing it.

She is not weak. She is practiced.

So practiced that her body has begun to mistake holding for identity.

She knows the language of all of this. She has done the therapy, the yoga, the retreats, the inner work. She has carried other people's opening with a skill and a depth that is rare.

And she has come home, again and again, to a body still waiting. Still braced. Still slightly out of reach even from herself.

The room she enters is warm.

Not warm the way a spa is warm. Warm the way a body is warm when it has stopped guarding.

The light does not expose. There is no one here who needs anything from her.

She lies down.

The hands that begin to move are not in a hurry. They are not performing care. There is a difference between those two things her nervous system knows before her mind does.

Her breath finds its depth without her deciding to breathe.

Something she has been carrying since before she could name it begins, quietly, to put itself down.

Not dramatically. The way snow settles. The way a held note finally ends.

She does not have to give anything here. She does not have to understand anything here. She does not have to be the one who holds.

Warmth returns to places she had stopped expecting it. Sensation in the belly. Aliveness at the surface of the skin.

Not earned. Not explained. Simply present, the way it was before she learned that her body was something to manage.

She remembers.

Not the memory of a thought. The memory of a body that knew how to be at home in itself.