The Weight of Feathers

What colour could hold the feelings that gather around you? Can your touch—that touch which isn't on skin, yet skin remembers it—find clarity even in the depths of words? The way it remembers winter's first shudder, the way it remembers a cool hand on the forehead when fever clouds the mind?

Will you come today?—the way a bird's call pierces the dark before dawn, some melody lost and recovered...that someone is humming in the next room, or a story worn smooth by habit—whose beginning we recall, whose end no one knows, yet still we cannot stop telling it.

Brief moments, certain moments, fill our memory—the way a bird's feather is light, almost nothing, drifting on air, yet without that almost-nothing the bird cannot fly, the sky cannot belong to it; just so, familiarity adds weight to longing, depletes it, exhausts it—and yet that invisible thread, that daily presence beside me, how it heals the quiet illness nesting in the heart, so slowly, so silently, that recovery itself leaves no trace, no moment we can point to and say: here is where I became well.

Now and then, the rain of existence falls—drop by drop, leaf by leaf, the way leaves fall from trees—uncollected, uncounted. No one ever came when the waiting ended—the waiting itself was the end, the waiting itself the destination.

I could not write you—the way water trapped deep in the eye's corner never dries, never spills, that no one sees, that doesn't even know when it arrived. No one sees you living within me, no one hears all those unspoken words—returning again, again, in the scent hidden in the fold of fingers, in the pressed flower on a notebook's cover, in the kohl of wet eyes that spreads across the cheek—in dark letters, in a language left unread.