when someone might read what you have never written
when there is hope, even just a last faint –
before the last ray folds into the darkit feels doableto hold the pen
to let it move
to trust the ink knows the wayonly when all is gone
when the last ember has cooled
when the remnants too have faded
and that ray no one ever saw
is simply –
gonenothing feels doable anymorethe letters bleed at their edges
consumed by something with no alphabet
only weight
only wet
only the slow warp of paper
from what the heart
cannot keep.
We used to talk about forever,
didn't we?
You'd trace routes on maps we'd never travel,
I'd build albums for kids who'd never ask
about the day we met –
both of us so certain
your hand would find mine
across every future table.Forever felt so solid then,
heavy in the best way,
like gravity holding everything in place.Who knew forever could end up
being so temporary?
That it would last exactly
one thousand six hundred and twenty-four days,
then crumble like cotton candy
touched by rain.I don't curse it anymore,
the way our always became our once.
Some loves build homes that last.
Ours drew maps of countries
that couldn't hold their borders,
every plan we made
now charts an Atlantis,
real and lost,
proving drowned things
still change the shape of tides.We just didn't know
some eternities fit inside
a handful of years,
burning bright and brief
before collapsing into memory,
leaving us to carry their glow
through all the darker rooms that follow.
There's a window. Frosted now. Funny how memory insists it was clear. Shapes were visible through it. Small movements, occasional details.
Behind it, presumably, life continues – stories accumulating, the heart doing what hearts do in the usual passing of time. But the glimpses that used to slip through have ceased.Glass frosts: an unremarkable process, natural as weather.
Still – there's this moment of standing at the cold pane and the hand beginning its arc to wipe the glass, then pausing as recognition arrives: it was never essential to see through, certainly pleasant but never vital, a casual luxury now quietly withdrawn.
So the hand falls. The frost stays.Perhaps it's about the peculiar discomfort of a border suddenly appearing where none was noticed before – not quite pain, scarcely sensation, more like reaching for something out of habit and finding the shelf rearranged.Or perhaps memory simply lies about windows – about what was ever really visible at all.
The wind was relentless that morning – the kind that turns umbrellas inside out and makes you lean into it just to stay upright. I was waiting for the 06:34, tightening my scarf, when I noticed them: two figures on the platform, locked together against the gale. Her hair whipped wild around them both, catching briefly on his coat. And still they remained. A small pocket of calmness in all that chaos, until the train pulled in with its mechanical insistence, and separation became inevitable.There I sit, my thoughts drifting as they often do – north this time, to a small town at the very edge of Germany, where my grandparents had lived. My grandmother had a cello that sat in the corner of her living room. After she died, no one played it. Beautiful instrument - graceful lines, dark wood catching whatever light the windows offered. Yet a cello is not meant to stand alone. It's made to be held, nestled between knees, drawn against the body's warmth until the bow's patient friction wakes the strings and coaxes the hollow inside to bloom into sound. Without such embrace, a cello is merely emptiness shaped in wood and wire.I blinked. The doors were opening, indifferent as always. The wind pushed against me, cold and impersonal.