What Remains

Lately I’ve been thinking about the strange arrogance of believing certain people will remain beside us forever.

They become woven so deeply into the architecture of daily life that we stop imagining absence as possible. Some relationships move beyond choice and become landscape. Weather. Structure.

And then one day the world continues without asking permission.

The cars still move.
The sun still rises.
Someone somewhere is giving birth while another person is grieving.

I wrote this a few mornings ago while staring out the window trying to understand what remains after something foundational disappears.

The noise is a distant humming
in your absence.

Your difficult and unexpected departure —
I watch it now from the window, far away.

Cars stream past.
The sun continues his shining thing.

Babies enter the frame,
their new lives still unimpeded
by loss and grief,

that natural, unpleasant companion
to living these years.

I tricked myself into believing
I was immune to the loss of you.

That we had moved beyond
what I dismissed
as the temporary dramas of youth.

That beneath it all
was constancy —

something that could outweigh
the struggles of living,
the old wounds
still breathing beneath my skin.

I was wrong.

And so, swimming now
in the watery field of what remains,

I look for a new way to live.

Maybe not yet to love.
But to live.

To notice the bluebird
on a spring walk.

To see the fresh green return
of the world —

while somewhere inside myself
I fight
a return to death.

---