The Night I Learned to Hold My Own Hand

By David Anson Lee

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

Never will I forget

the smell of wet asphalt after rain:

that mineral heat rising from the street,

the earth

exhaling.

I was small enough

to believe laughter could hold up the sky.

My father’s voice carried across the yard,

loose, unafraid,

even as bills gathered

like unopened warnings

on the kitchen table.

Never will I forget

the kitchen light:

its tired yellow hum,

and the way silence thickened

after the door

closed too hard.

That was the night

I sat on the edge of my narrow bed,

springs pressing faint constellations

into my back,

and folded my fingers together

as if they belonged

to someone older.

“You will survive,” I whispered:

not brave,

not certain;

only needing the words

to land somewhere

that would not move.

Outside, a stray dog

knocked over a trash can.

In the ditch, a single hubcap

caught the moon:

silver, useless,

still shining

as if it remembered

the wheel it once held.

Never will I forget

how my hands trembled

before they steadied.

How the room

did not change.

How I did.

Through the thin curtain

the night kept breathing.

And in that small house,

with its flicker

and its fracture,

I learned

that survival is sometimes

nothing more

than refusing

to let go

of yourself.

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David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and now living in Texas. His writing explores memory, identity, and resilience through lived experience. He writes to honor silence broken, survival learned young, and the quiet courage that shapes a life.