Time does not redeem absences, though today claims to be absolute. Nothing can be revived in the now. In murky brown, the eyes of who you were grow dim, it could have been and has been. I cannot reclaim the scent of my secret garden. Today the grass thickens the walls, more powerful and grey than their cement. I cannot call you back in this moment, nor in my dreams, even if a white—always—paints the streets of a constant, ever-shedding city. I am no longer who I was, pain has opened other wounds and my dream of hope repaints my poetry in fresh hues. I went, but I am not, and in my dreams, I remember who you were, but you left yesterday and no one waits for me today.
# Fog The fog comes in, a thief on quiet feet, stealing the edges of things. First the distant hills disappear— swallowed whole, as if they never were. Then the far trees fade to rumor, to something half-remembered, something you almost dreamed. Closer now. The fence posts become shadows. The road ahead narrows to a hand's breadth, a pale suggestion, a whisper of where to go. Everything withdraws. The world contracts to the circle of your vision, to breath visible in air, to the damp weight of nothing pressing against your skin. You could be anywhere. You could be no one. The fog makes philosophers of us all— erases certainty, suspends us in this gray place where solid ground feels borrowed, where you move forward on faith alone, on the strange trust that something solid still exists just beyond what you can see. And perhaps it does. Or perhaps the fog is telling us the truth: that we were always walking blind, that the world was always mostly hidden, mostly mercy, mostly the space between what we know and what we can only believe.
Share this article