The collection
Later he spoke truthfully about grief, and the walls themselves seemed embarrassed for him. Someone coughed. Someone closed a ledger. No one looked him in the eye again. After that he learned procedure. A man must drag himself through life without allowing the chains to make noise. He must bleed internally. He must decay in…
I have known silence with many. Heavy silence. The kind that asks to be survived. But with you even silence smiled. And I think of this often, how some people arrive not with thunder but with a laugh that makes a place feel warmer. It is a small thing, laughter. Men say that. They are…
Days passed without measure. I stopped counting them. The noise in my head did not leave at once. It fought. It circled back. It tried to make itself important. But the woods are patient. They do not argue. They outlast.
I only stand here now, in this small crossing of lives, aware that I am late, but not lost. Because something in me recognized something in you as if the universe, despite its endless distance, still knew how to bend two separate paths into a single moment.
I do not come with clever sentences or the language of certainty. I come only with the small trembling truth that appears when someone begins to matter.
I wasn’t expecting you, to find me when I was lost in thought, wrapped in my own solitude, content with the silence that had grown familiar, only to have it broken by the sound of your laughter, a sound that now echoes through my heart.
Exile is not being sent away, it is being forced to live where meaning still exists but permission does not. You feel it in moments that misfire: a laugh arriving too early, a thought addressed to no one, a warmth with no object. The field remains intact. Only access is revoked.
When I say I love you time loosens its belt. The past stops arguing, the future leans closer to listen.
Perhaps this is love now, not the collision of bodies, but the sustained attention we offer each other across impossible space.
Night brings you without apology. You lie beside my thoughts as if you have always belonged there, as if forgetting were a language my body never learned.