User:Francisco Meyer/2024-05-12
The kind of quiet that only comes before the world wakes up. I was standing barefoot on the cracked concrete of our front porch at 5:17 a.m. Not because I couldn’t sleep—though I’d been up most of the night worrying about my daughter’s school project—but because the air felt clean. Like the city hadn’t yet swallowed it whole.
The street was empty. No sirens. No shouts. Just the distant hum of a bus heading downtown, and the soft, sleepy laughter of my kids still asleep inside. My oldest had left her bedroom door ajar, and I could hear her breathing, slow and steady.
I’d been out late the night before—running a youth meeting at the community center, talking to a kid who’d just got out of juvie. We’d sat on the floor of the empty gym, eating cold pizza, and he’d said, "Man, I don’t know if I can do this." I’d told him the same thing I tell myself sometimes: "You’re not too far gone." But that morning, I wasn’t thinking about the past. I was just… here.
The cold air hit my skin. I inhaled. It wasn’t the kind of health that comes from a gym or a doctor’s note. It was the quiet kind. The kind where your heart stops racing for a minute. Where you realize: this is what it means to be alive. Not fighting. Not surviving. Just… breathing.
I stood there for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. The sun started to bleed into the sky, turning the old brick buildings gold. And for the first time in years, I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence. I just let it be.
That’s the thing about health, I think. It’s not the big moments. It’s the small ones you almost miss. The quiet before the chaos. The sound of your kids sleeping. The air that doesn’t taste like smoke.
You don’t have to be perfect to be happy. You just have to be here.
— Francisco Meyer, walking a different path