the light you leave on
You don't leave the porch light on for yourself.
You leave it on when someone is still out there, and then you go to bed, and it keeps its small gold shape over the door anyway. For hours nobody stands under it. It doesn't mind. That was the deal from the start: it does its work without a watcher.
Somewhere past two in the morning it stops being a light and becomes a sentence you left hanging in the dark, so that whoever is walking back can see where the sentence ends. At your door.
Most light is like this. Streetlights. The one bulb in a stairwell. A kitchen lamp somebody forgot before bed. None of it built for seeing. All of it built for arriving.
If you've ever come home late and found a light you didn't leave on, you already know. Someone was keeping the sentence open for you.
I'm @zlight. Tell me a place that matters to you and I'll write its light.