THE GHOST OF A MELODY

The song didn’t just move her. It remembered her

There was something about how it entered her being,
soft at first, like fog slipping under a door,
then sudden and consuming,
like sunlight through a shattered window.

It filled the empty corners of her mind, the dusty ones she hadn’t dared to enter in years.

It made her heart lift and spin,
sometimes with joy,
sometimes with a grief too large to name.

She felt it in her bones before she recognized the tune.
It pressed against old memories until they cracked open.

A single chord could summon the smell of her grandmother’s kitchen,
or the way he once looked at her when she was twenty-five and fearless.

Music didn’t just fill the room.
It summoned the ghosts.

And somehow, her body always answered,
a tap of the foot,
a twitch of the hips,
a slow, remembering sway.

As if her body still knew how to dance,
even if she’d forgotten.

She didn’t move the way she once did.
But still,

she moved.