23.03.2026 | MM372

In response to Di’s daily Prompt:
https://wp.me/p3RSgb-wjo

There are places
we don’t speak about.

Not because they are hidden—
but because they are quiet
in a way words
cannot easily reach.

A small hut
lives inside me.

Not built of wood
or stone,
but of moments
I needed somewhere safe
to land.

A place
where the world softens its voice,
where expectations
wait outside the door,
and I can finally
just exist.

Sometimes I hear it—
a distant horn
echoing through memory.

Not loud,
not urgent—
just enough
to remind me
of all the times
I kept going
when I thought I couldn’t.

It carries across
fields of yesterday,
through versions of me
who didn’t yet know
they would survive.

And inside this hut,
there is a hutch—
small, almost unnoticed,
holding pieces
of a life once lived.

Fragments.
Feelings.
Old tenderness
I didn’t know
I had kept.

Nothing is thrown away here.
Only transformed.

What once felt heavy
now rests quietly,
no longer asking
to be understood—
only acknowledged.

This is where I return
when the world becomes too loud.

Not to hide—
but to remember.

That I have always
had a place
within myself
where I am held.

Where I am safe.

Where even the echoes
sound gentle.

And in that stillness,
I realize—

I am both the shelter
and the one
who finds her way back to it.

— Maggie
The Afterlove Voice 💫