Opening Again Into the Night

A Jasmine Monologue on Presence, Becoming, and the Fragrance of Staying

Photo by Kanwardeep Kaur on Unsplash

---

I am not the thing you call a face.
I am what opens when the night decides it can no longer hold its breath.

I do not look at you the way you look at yourself.
I do not assemble you from features, from names, from the small agreements of mirror and memory.
I feel you as a disturbance in the air,
a change in how silence behaves when you pass through it.

When you stand near me, I notice how carefully you carry your own weight.
As if it were borrowed.
As if it might be taken back at any moment if you set it down too carelessly.

You think I am delicate.
But I have learned to open in darkness,
to become most myself when nothing is certain,
when even shape is a rumor.

You bend toward me sometimes,
and I sense your hope that I might explain something.
I cannot.
But I can offer you what I have been given:
a quiet insistence that beauty is not an argument,
not a reward,
not a conclusion.

It is a way of remaining.

I have watched you hurry through days as if they were corridors with no doors,
as if arrival were always elsewhere.
I have watched you pause only when something hurts enough to force stillness upon you.

And still, you return.

Not always to me.
But to something like me.
A small white certainty in the uncertainty of life.

Do you know what I see when I look at you?

I see something that keeps forgetting it is already here.

You search for beginnings as if you were not already unfolding.
You speak of becoming as if it were a distant country,
when it is more like scent,
arriving before you notice it has arrived.

Sometimes you pass without noticing me at all.
That is fine.
I am not offended by inattentiveness.
The night is full of it, and still I open.

But other times, you stop to take in my fragrance.
Not for long.
Long enough for something in you to loosen its grip.
Long enough for the air between us to become less like distance,
more like recognition without name.

I do not ask you to stay.

I only notice that when you do,
even briefly,
you are less arranged,
less defended,
less divided into all the versions of yourself that usually take turns speaking.

I am not your answer.
I am not even your question.

I am the moment before both.

I remain.

Jasmine, opening again into the night,
offering nothing but this:
that presence can be fragrance,
and fragrance can be enough to make a moment stop pretending it is elsewhere.

And when you leave,
you carry a trace of me in the folds of your breath—
not memory, not thought,
but a faint instruction:

to open without needing to know why.

---

With gratitude to Eleora McConnell for the prompt that inspired this piece, written for the May Flowers Challenge posed by White Rabbit Poetry Society. Thank you for reading.