Draft 2: Between Meetings and Midnight

Between Meetings and Midnight
by Madison Bryant

She lives in the in-between...
between meetings and midnight,
between the hum of the dishwasher
and the whisper of her own light rising.

She drives home under a sky
the color of the day exhaling,
headlights painting gold across grocery bags
and the soft chaos of backpacks in the back seat.

Her name has been called a hundred times today…
at work, at home,
in the echo between both.
And still, it smolders quietly inside her,
the spark she can’t contain.

Her mind is a lantern of fireflies.
Ideas flicker while she answers emails,
while she wipes fingerprints from the wall,
while she folds the same small shirt
for the hundredth time.

Somewhere in that rhythm…
rinse, repeat, remember,
she is building something:
a blueprint, a belief, a beginning.

A quiet uprising of brilliance,
happening behind her tired smile.

It visits her in the quietest moments…
when the TV murmurs in another room,
when her children’s laughter drifts into sleep,
when the world finally stops asking for something.

That’s when it breathes again…
the idea that won’t leave her alone.

It doesn’t roar.
It radiates.

She writes on receipts.
She dreams in traffic.
She speaks her vision
to the steering wheel and the sky.

Her life doesn’t feel glamorous.
It feels gritty.
Ordinary.

But even here…
in the low hum of the refrigerator,
the buzz of the baby monitor,
the soft ache behind her eyes…
she is creating light.

The kind that warms.
The kind that thinks its way forward.
The kind that outlives
her calendar,
her inbox,
her exhaustion.

Someday they’ll call it purpose.

But today,
it’s just a woman
in a wrinkled dress and borrowed time,
thoughts glowing behind her eyes.

And somewhere,
the universe leans closer…
because it knows:

The next great idea
is being born
in a kitchen
by a woman
who refused to stop thinking.