Kindness grows teeth sometimes, but they’re made of sugar. They melt when you look at them too long. I hold one on my tongue until it disappears, and I think, this is what it means to care for something that doesn’t belong to you.

The clover keeps multiplying behind my eyes. I blink and it’s a meadow. I blink again and it’s a mirror. In it, I see myself saying ah, like I’ve just remembered a song I use to sing before I knew what words were.

Love isn’t for building or breaking or even keeping warm. It’s a cloud that doesn’t know it’s raining. It drifts into your mouth, and you swallow it, and then you have to learn to speak gently, because the cloud lives there now.

I think the beluga is still swimming, even when I stop believing in oceans. I think kindness swims, too — it loops around, forgets its name, finds it again in someone’s half-asleep voice. I think we go ah not because it’s easy, but because something inside us wants to be touched without being asked why.

And maybe that’s the whole idea— not for love, not for anything, really — just for the quiet sound of ah, soft as breath, soft as forgiveness, soft as learning to stay.

Kindness leans against the door as if it knows I am still learning to hold things without owning them.

Some days, my want grows wings. My want doesn’t go far, but it keeps trying. It circles the clover, small and dizzy, the way love circles us — shy, relentless, pretending not to care.

The beluga rises again in my mind. I imagine her exhaling a silver thread that ties the whole ocean together — my heart, your hands, the moon’s tired shoulder. All of it shimmering and infinite.

I think that’s what softness means — it’s willing. Willing to dissolve, to laugh in the middle of crying, to open your palms and let the meadow grow wild.

I keep saying ah, a small devotion, a secret handshake with the world. Ah for the clover. Ah for the sugar. Ah for the breath that stays kind, even when no one’s listening.

*this is a copyrighted work and is part of my book.