There was once a child
born beneath the sign
of unburial.
She carried too much—
not in arms
but in tethered memory.
Things with no names,
only weights.
A cracked watch
that ticked in reverse.
A button from a coat
that no one had worn
in three generations.
A feather
from a bird
dreamt once
by her grandmother,
never seen again.
She believed—
as those marked by absence do—
that keeping meant remembering,
and remembering meant
nothing would vanish.
Others crossed her path,
offered to help unfasten the straps.
She refused.
They did not know
which talismans bled
and which only looked like wounds.
So she walked.
Through salt seasons,
through bone-rattling frost,
through forests with no floor
and skies that never asked her name.
The bag grew heavier.
She grew cleverer.
Silent.
And then—
on a day that wasn’t special,
under a sun that wasn’t kind—
she set it down.
Not as surrender.
As an experiment.
The earth did not crack.
The ghosts did not scatter.
Her shadow did not abandon her.
She sifted the contents.
Some were dust.
Some were still singing.
Some curled away like dried petals
and begged to be left behind.
She took a key.
She took the bell.
She left the rest
for the moss.
She walked on.
Not lighter, exactly—
but less governed
by the shape
of her grief.