Second Climate
Her skin holds light differently, not borrowed, not reflected.
But absorbed, kept, deepened.
Her hair rechase upward,
Curling towards something ancient but still.
Hands hover near it as if curiosity attains more rights than her.
Her lips full of language, hesitate sporadically.
Not for the lack of words, but the careful knowing of how they will be received.
The knowing that every word must survive the distance between meaning and reception.
She entered with a practiced ease, but her presence was announced and judged long before she was ever allowed to arrive.
She rearranges herself daily, a chair pushed back here.
A mirror turned just slightly away there.
So the quiet fault line within her remains undisturbed, unnamed.
And still she moves as though none of this is spectacle.
Yet, the room recalibrates.
Subtly.
Precisely.
A shift so fine it evades accusation,
yet palpable enough to settle
against her skin like a second climate.
She, weary of being atmosphere, of being something reacted to.
Interpreted, forecasted. Weary of existing as the weather.
Discussed.
Rarely understood.
She desires the gravity of Earth instead.
To be unremarked in her permanence.
To hold weight without spectacle.
To exist without translation
Without the constant labor of being legible.
To be assumed, as mountains are assumed,
As soil is trusted, the ground is never questioned for holding.
And perhaps she will arrive as the sun arrives
not interrogated, not exceptionalized,
not a rendered anomaly
but inevitable, integral,
and entirely her own.
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