The Horizon Wears Your Face
Life has always been jealous of distance.
Every time I move toward you, it rearranges the map.
A road becomes water.
A doorway becomes winter.
A single mile learns the language of continents.
And still—
the horizon wears your face.
That is the cruelty.
It does not hide you.
It lets me see.
It paints you at the edge of everything, close enough for longing to mistake itself for direction.
So I walk.
And the earth, faithless thing,
keeps unfolding beneath my feet.
You remain where sky pretends to touch the world.
Almost reachable.
Almost mine.
Almost has always been the sharpest word.
There was a time when the universe closed its hand around you.
No thunder.
No warning.
Just absence.
One day your light belonged to my sky.
Then suddenly the night had learned how to keep secrets.
Years passed.
I became fluent in missing things without naming them.
I built rooms around the hollow.
Hung pictures over the cracks.
Learned how to sleep beside an empty place without asking who had once lived there.
Then—
you returned.
Not like a person.
Like weather.
Like rain finding a country that had forgotten the smell of wet earth.
Like a star appearing exactly where an old sailor had sworn one used to be.
And everything in me that had learned how not to remember
remembered.
I thought perhaps the world was correcting itself.
Perhaps all those years had only been a long sentence
and you were the missing word.
But the universe does not return things cleanly.
It brought back your voice,
but wrapped it in distance.
It returned your laughter,
but placed glass between my hands and the sound.
It gave me your nearness
the way a museum gives you fire—
behind something you are not allowed to break.
So there you are.
Visible.
Breathing.
Carrying a life that clings to you like an old season that refuses to end.
There are still hands in your weather.
Old gravity.
Old vows.
Old rooms that know your footsteps even when your heart has stopped calling them home.
And I see it.
The way your spirit leans elsewhere.
The way some part of you has already packed.
The way your eyes sometimes stand at a station your body has not reached.
I want to say—
come.
But the word feels too small.
So instead I leave the light on.
I keep one window open toward your direction.
I let the night know there is still a place here that remembers your shape.
Come when the old house finally loosens its fingers.
Come when the ropes forget your name.
Come when your feet belong only to themselves again.
I will not drag you across the border.
I will not become another hand pulling at your life.
There are distances love cannot cross without becoming violence.
So I remain on my side of the impossible.
Watching.
Not waiting—
there is a difference.
Waiting asks time to stop.
I do not.
I live.
I breathe.
I move.
But somewhere inside every direction,
there is still a needle trembling toward you.
Because some people become north without permission.
And every compass in the body remembers.
Sometimes, in the quietest hour,
I imagine the horizon finally growing tired.
I imagine it dropping its disguise.
I imagine the sky admitting it was never a wall.
And there you are—
not far,
not taken,
not belonging to some other geography.
Just there.
Near enough that distance has nothing left to say.
I reach.
You reach.
And for one impossible second,
our hands meet.
No glass.
No road.
No history standing between our fingers.
Every year folds inward.
Every mile forgets itself.
Every goodbye becomes an unfinished sentence.
Then morning comes.
And the horizon puts your face back on.
My hand returns empty.
The road returns beneath me.
The world continues pretending it does not know what it is doing.
Still—
I have learned something from the sea.
It reaches for the shore knowing it will be pulled back.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Not because it believes the shore belongs to it,
but because something ancient inside water recognizes land.
Perhaps that is what you are to me.
Not possession.
Recognition.
A coastline my soul remembers from before I knew the word home.
And perhaps that is why every road away from you feels slightly wrong.
Why every sky eventually turns your color.
Why every distance, no matter how wide,
still feels like something temporary.
So let life keep moving the mountains.
Let it stretch the roads.
Let it teach oceans new ways to stand between us.
I will not chase the horizon.
I know better now.
But I will look toward it.
Because somewhere beneath all that blue,
you are still there.
And if one day the world grows tired of pulling you away,
if one day the map stops changing,
if one day the horizon finally removes your face—
I hope it is only because
you are standing
close enough
for me to see your real one.