Elm Park | 1988

It was an age when the world still felt like a secret waiting to be overheard.

Evening walks in the cool hush of New England air.
A boy at her side, his hand warm in hers,
but her mind wandered beyond their words—
drifting toward the trees, the hush of water beneath the bridges,
the architecture of old stones that remembered.

There was a building—
Ivy-cloaked, ancient, reverent.
It pulled at her from the inside,
something magnetic in its silence,
a calling she couldn’t yet name.
It stirred in her a kind of ache—not pain,
but the ache of being known by something
you haven’t met yet.

They would walk for hours like this,
his voice weaving in and out of her attention,
while her soul scanned the sky.
The sun setting behind cathedral spires,
the moon arriving like an old friend
who spoke a language only she could hear.

Even then,
she knew she loved the symmetry of dawn and dusk—
but it was the moon she worshipped.
Especially when full.
Especially when rising.
It whispered through her,
a quiet electricity
that would follow her all her life.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai