Exile
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.
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.
I think of you
the way fruit
thinks of summer,
inevitably,
without impatience,
accepting sweetness
as a form of waiting.
Do not think I exaggerate.
Love is exact.
It measures the distance
between two chairs,
counts the seconds
between one message and the next,
knows precisely
how much silence a heart can carry
before it breaks like a plate
dropped on a kitchen floor.
And here I stand,
between house and horizon,
between what England has been
and what this morning
is briefly willing to promise,
content to witness,
to make no speech grander
than this simple fact:
The light arrived.
It found me ready.