Always Its Home
written by: Christina Stewart
By morning
I fasten a smiling mask to my bones.
It walks me into light,
into rooms full of voices and easy laughter.
It shakes hands with expectation,
performs its bright little theatre
for anyone who watches.
It laughs when laughter is required.
It nods. It speaks. It moves among the living
as though it belongs there.
No one questions it.
No one questions it.
But night remembers.
When the last lights fade to embers
and the noise of the world collapses into silence,
the mask loosens.
The mask loosens.
Then the other one returns.
It waits in the dark,
patient as a spider in a sealed room,
a shadow that has learned my shape.
Hollowed, quiet, listening,
my own thoughts echoing like footsteps
in an empty house.
And in that hour,
when the walls lean closer
and the dark seems almost alive,
I wonder
how long a soul can survive divided,
how many mornings I can send the mask
back into the sun
before the darkness inside me
rises, slow and certain as a tide,
and remembers
that this body
was always its home.
Always its home.
- Always Its Home - June 27, 2026
- Entangled Particles of Us - March 30, 2026
- The Gift We Carry - December 22, 2025
