There is a kind of memory that doesn’t belong to words. It lives instead in sensation — in the weight of small, warm hands, in the softness of chubby fingers wrapping around nothing in particular, just because the world is new and worth touching.
Childhood is not a chapter so much as a light. It falls unevenly, golden and unfiltered, on everything equally: grass, flowers, your own curious breath. There is an unrepeatable honesty in those early years, the way attention is absolute, untrained, alive. A yellow flower is not “a flower.” It is an entire event. A hand is not small or big. It is enough.
We grow older and learn to name things, to sort them, to rush past them. But sometimes, for a second, something opens again - a quiet reminder of that earlier state. The world still holds the same softness. We just forget how to hold it back.