I was carrying a box of donated poetry books when I heard a laugh I hadn't heard in thirteen years.

The cardboard was damp with sweat from my palms as I moved boxes of poetry books from table to table. Salt air mixed with the distant sound of poets reading under white tents, their voices carrying across the grass like prayers. I was focused on organizing the donations when that laugh, bright, unmistakable, completely Keira, cut through everything else.

I froze.

My first instinct was to keep walking. Pretend I hadn't heard it. The last thirteen years suddenly felt heavy in my chest. What do you say to someone who knew you when you thought you'd change the world with words? When you believed poetry could save everything, including yourself?

But then I turned.

There she was, standing next to a man I recognized as Robert, her husband now. They were older, obviously. We all were. But Keira's signature afro, that glorious crown I'd recognize anywhere, was exactly the same. The moment I saw it, everything clicked. Robert had laugh lines that weren't there when we shared stages in our twenties. But her smile, that hair, the way she carried herself, that was exactly the same.

"Faust?" she said, and then her face lit up. "No, I gotta stand up for you." She rose from the blanket where she'd been sitting, and my name in her voice transported me instantly back to cramped coffee shops and late-night rehearsals with True Voices, when we thought we were revolutionaries armed with metaphors.

"Keira," I said, setting down the box. "Robert."

The hug was awkward at first, then fierce. We held on longer than people usually do, as if we were afraid the other might disappear again.

"Thirteen years," Robert said, checking his watch. "I have to get to the White Horse stage soon, performing 'I Too Had A Dream' with the Hoboken Poets."

I couldn't. But standing there, I realized something that surprised me. I had expected this moment to feel like failure, like we'd all somehow let our younger selves down. Instead, it felt like coming home.

We talked for five minutes about everything and nothing. Kids, jobs, the poetry scene, mutual friends we'd lost touch with. But underneath the catching up, I kept thinking about the person I was when I knew them last. Twenty-something, hungry, certain that success meant stages and applause and recognition. A different person entirely, not just in age, but in faith, in understanding, in what I believed about the world.

Now, at thirty-nine, I was volunteering at a poetry festival. Moving books from table to table. No spotlight, no microphone. Just serving the community that had shaped me.

"You know what I love about this?" Keira said, gesturing at the festival around us. "We're all still here. Still showing up for poetry."

That's when it hit me. The five-second moment that would stay with me long after the festival ended.

We hadn't failed our younger selves. We'd become something better. We'd become the people who hold up the stages instead of needing to be on them. Who donate books instead of just writing them. Who create space for other voices instead of demanding space for our own.

"Same time next year?" Robert asked as we prepared to part ways.

"Absolutely," I said, and meant it.

I picked up my box of books and continued toward the tent, but everything felt different now. Lighter. The weight I'd been carrying, that sense of dreams deferred, of paths not taken, had shifted into something else entirely.

Purpose.

The poetry festival continued around me, voices rising and falling like waves, but I wasn't just carrying books anymore. I was carrying forward the understanding that sometimes the most profound success is invisible. Sometimes changing the world looks like showing up, again and again, for the thing you love.

Even if no one is watching.

Especially if no one is watching.