She cried for Leo. She cried for her father. She cried for the girl who erased her poems, for the woman who became a nurse because saving others was easier than saving herself. She cried for every night she had lain awake counting ceiling tiles, for every time she had chosen silence over the terrifying risk of being known.
She doesn’t tell them the rest. That a morning star is not a star at all, but a planet—Venus—the one that shines brightest just before dawn, when the night is darkest. The one that refuses to go out. justdanica
She screamed.
So Justdanica learned to keep her fractures on the inside, where no one could see the hairline cracks spreading like winter frost on a windowpane. She cried for Leo
She still has the plate. The blue-flower one. It sits on her kitchen windowsill, catching the morning light. The cracks are still there—you can see every single one if you look close enough. But the plate holds. It holds flowers now—daisies, the ones that grow in sidewalk cracks, the ones that shouldn’t survive but do. She cried for every night she had lain
Her mother called last week. Not to say sorry—she still doesn’t know how—but to say, “I’m making soup. Do you want some?” And Justdanica said yes, because sometimes healing looks like a bowl of chicken noodle and two women who are learning, very slowly, that broken things don’t have to be fixed alone.