The Keeper of Misplaced Things
by Ruvael Nyx
They say I scatter kindness wide,
like petals drifting down a stream;
but that has never been the tide
that pulls me toward a stranger's gleam.
I do not stop to simply praise,
nor speak because the moment sings;
I only recognize the ways
the world misplaces precious things.
A woman draped in marigold,
yet shrinking from her borrowed grace;
a weary man who walks as though
the sun forgot his resting place.
A girl who hides behind a laugh,
afraid her beauty sounds too loud;
a soul who learned to cut in half
the parts that never pleased the crowd.
And everywhere I look, I find
small treasures left in human dust:
forgotten pieces of the mind,
abandoned fragments of self-trust.
Then softly, with a passing phrase,
I place them back where they belong;
and watch their eyes relight with ways
that prove they were not lost for long.
Not smiles—those are the aftermath.
Not gratitude—that fades away.
I love the second someone has
their own reflection gently stay.
As if a mirror, cracked by years,
suddenly remembers how to mend;
as if beneath accumulated fears,
a stranger meets their truest friend.
Perhaps I notice this because
comparison once hollowed me.
I know the silent kind of loss
that comes from being taught to see
another person's light as proof
that yours was somehow less alive;
as though the sky has room for truth
only when a single star survives.
What foolish mathematics this,
to measure wonder, weigh delight;
to act as though one flower's kiss
must steal another flower's light.
The rose does not diminish rain.
The jasmine does not wound the dawn.
Yet people carry needless pain
from scales they never stood upon.
So now, whenever beauty speaks,
however quietly it may,
I answer it before it seeks
permission to be turned away.
Because the world has taken enough,
confidence, softness, self-belief;
it wraps them all in harsher stuff
and calls the theft a kind of grief.
If I can hand one fragment back,
one piece of worth the years untied;
then something mended in the crack
where loneliness and doubt collide.
So no, I do not give at all.
I simply guard what others lose:
small constellations that have fallen
from the skies they once called home.
And every now and then, I watch
a stranger straighten, bloom, and rise,
not because I made them beautiful,
but because they finally saw themselves
through kinder eyes.
Published on the Writory Wall.