I noticed it in the mirror.
Not dramatically — not the sudden visible rounding that announcement required. Something subtler. The specific change in the way my body occupied space, a shift in proportion that was too small to be certain about but too present to ignore. I stood in the washroom at an odd hour with the lamp on and looked at my own reflection and registered: something is different.
My hand went to my stomach automatically.
The gesture had become as natural as breathing.
The small warmth below my ribs — which had been my constant companion through weeks now, which I had stopped noting the way you stop noting breathing because it was simply the new baseline — responded the way it always did.
Present.
Patient.
Mine.
I stood at the mirror for a long time.
Not in distress —
