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There is a feather on my desk. It lies limp and weightless, as though it remembers a sky I no longer belong to. Sometimes I pick it up and wonder which wing it came from. The one that carried my younger self? The one that believed love and freedom could exist together? The one that dreamed of distant places without feeling guilty for wanting? I do not know. I only know it is all that remains. The rest were taken gradually. Not in a single act of cruelty, but in small and ordinary ways. A sacrifice here. A responsibility there. A thousand quiet choices made out of love. "Stay," they said. And I did. Not because they broke my wings. Not because they left me too damaged to leave. I stayed because some bonds are stronger than freedom. Yet some nights, when the house is asleep and the world finally stops asking things of me, I look at the feather and grieve. Not for where I could have gone. But for who I might have been. Still, I keep it. A small reminder that there was once something in me that knew how to rise. And perhaps there still is. Perhaps the feather survived so I would not forget. M. | feather July 2026


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