There are parts of you that did not disappear.

They went into the dark.
And the dark, as the dark does, kept them.

You did not bury them — not exactly. There was no shovel, no ceremony. There was only the morning you swallowed your wanting and called it maturity, and the afternoon your grief was told to wait, and the evening your strange joy was treated like a stranger at the door.

You closed the door.

You did not kill what was on the other side.

You only turned away, and the dark did what the dark does with anything left in it long enough — it held.

It held the boy who was tender in a house that mistook tenderness for weakness.
It held the girl whose anger arrived long before her permission did.
It held the hunger, the wildness, the first holy aliveness you were asked to outgrow before you had finished introducing it to yourself.

And it grew there.

Things grow in the dark. They are rarely the shape we left them.

You feel them, sometimes, without knowing what you are feeling.

A cold patch in a warm room. A held breath in the middle of a laugh. A flicker behind the ribs at the slightest mention of the life you never tried. A thinning in the air when a person tells you that they love you, and you believe them — and you still, for a breath, do not trust it.

That is them. That is the dark talking.

They speak in the 3 a.m. mood that has no name.
They speak in the unseasonable rage that arrives at the kitchen table and is much too old to be about dinner.
They speak in the friendships that cost you what they give you.
They speak in the strange, sour quiet that follows a victory and feels, for no honest reason, like loss.
They speak in the faces you cannot stop turning toward, and the faces you cannot stop turning from, and the long pause before either.

They are not gone.

They have been breathing down there this whole time.

Some kept your softness in jars, sealed with the label do not open.
Some kept your cruelty, and were right to keep it, because cruelty is also a feeling, and the feelings you are not allowed to feel become the ones that act.
Some kept your ambition, your strange appetite, the line of poetry that arrived once and you talked yourself out of repeating.
Some kept the version of you that was not yet embarrassed to want.

All of them waited.

Not with a grievance. With a patience older than you.
The way a stream waits behind a shut gate.
The way light waits in a room no one has entered in years.

So turn around.

Not fast. The dark is not the enemy. The dark is just unlit, and it has been holding your things a long time, and the right way to walk into a room you have not entered in years is with your hand out, listening, not throwing the lights on.

Somewhere ahead of you there is a door you closed when you were young.
There is breath on the other side of it.
There are footsteps that match yours.

Go in softly.
Go in as the person you have become, who can afford to meet them now.
Bring no torches.
Bring only the long-held willingness to recognize what you hear breathing.