locker room

i never met him, but i think i know him.

there’s a shape to the knowing — not clean nor aesthetic, more like greasy fingerprints left on car window. i trace it when the room is quiet and the music is low, when the sneakers on the gym floor squaek and the locker room lockers clicks like a metronome, quick with a hasty melodic escape. his rhythms live in my bones now; they arrange the small, ordinary movements of my days into gestures that feel familiar and dangerous but true.

sometimes i catch myself practicing a lyric that isn’t mine and I feel foolish to claim it, and then i remember: inheritance isn’t always legal paper or a name on a tombstone. it’s the cadence, the crooked smile, the sway of a song that can fold around a secret and make it singable. i look in the mirror and what stares back is both questioned and answered: a person stitched from people’s courage and their mistakes, someone learning how to stand tall on the broad shoulders from which the stories came.

maybe that’s what he knew of me: that i would take what i found and make it into something that lasts on a smaller scale. a melody quietly hummed on a tired morning, a dance that wakes up a crowded room. or maybe he saw, in whatever corners he occupied, the possibility of me finishing what he started: not by copying, but by carrying tremors of his truth.

so tonight as i close my locker and tuck this thought in my pocket like a stray dime on the dust pan. i don’t need to have met him to be home in his music; i only need to keep walking to it. and if one day someone else looks in the mirror and sees what i got the chance to see, maybe they’ll get it, too.