How The Light Learned Our Names

By the time I learned that light could remember people, my parents were already gone. Morning still arrived on time, sliding through the thin curtains of our apartment as if nothing had ever happened, as if my sister's heart was not failing in careful increments and my name had not become something the world said less often. I used to think light was indifferent—that it touched everything the same way. But some days, standing between the hospital window and the quiet of our kitchen, it felt like proof that we had existed at all.