A certain light in late afternoon. Music ending, and the silence after it somehow larger than the room. Mountains seen suddenly from a turn in the road; the face of someone sleeping; rain arriving after long heat. And for one beat there is no one behind your eyes — no accounting, no border, no audience — just the world, blazing quietly, enough. You call these moments beauty, and you assume beauty is a property of the things. It is not. It is what is always there, glimpsed through a hole in the wall — which is why such moments feel less like pleasure and more like homesickness ending. And notice what rises one breath later, every time: gratitude, by itself, aimed at no one in particular — the sound a wave makes when it remembers water.

Then the someone returns, and names the moment, and reaches for a camera, and the hole closes. But you have stood at it. You have been shown the open door a thousand times and called it scenery. The case for waking does not rest on your aches alone; half the evidence is joy.