Whisper

When you found me, I was lying in a grave I had not dug.

Someone had spent six years digging it. I had spent six years calling it a home.

You found what the blade had left— the softness cut away, the patience cut away, every edge that had made me difficult to hold lying somewhere on that floor.

And you did not try to shape me.

You picked up the pieces she had carved off and told me they had never been the problem.

But you were not new.

You knew the man before the ground was broken.

You knew him when he came into a room without stopping at the door to ask what he should be; when he never once looked down to see whether he was dressed for the company he was keeping.

She spent six years teaching me to look down.

Six years of learning which parts of me to leave at the door. Six years of shrinking to a size that could be carried comfortably.

And you— you brought me nothing new. You brought me back my name.

You said: you were kind. You said: you were gentle, and it was not weakness, it was weather— it came off you without effort.

You reminded me that I once took my own loss and made a gift out of it and handed it over with nothing left in my pockets.

You did not lift me. You reminded me I had once stood.

I had said that resurrection is not a whisper. That it takes thunder. That it takes fire walking into dead bone, a tomb coming apart at the hinges.

You were the thunder.

You gave me back a smile I had written off as lost property. You made my soul laugh in rooms I had closed and locked. You put warmth in places that had been sitting in winter so long they had stopped complaining about the cold.

And still— you were always altitude. Even at the beginning. Even before the ruin.

Even holding you, I was holding something the way the ground holds weather: briefly, and never by permission.

Then you were gone, and I learned what a room is like after the window has been bricked.

And when you came back it was not as before. It was as friend— the nearest thing that has a name with the distance built into it.

Still, before I understood what I was doing, I was thinking in forever. I was thinking of you as my always— mornings with you already in them, years that had not happened yet, a whole life I had no business drafting until you made me believe I might be allowed one.

And now you are a whisper.

You came as thunder and you stay as whisper. Something I can still hear. Still feel. Still know by its shape. But cannot hold.

I know I love you.

I know that somewhere under the rubble there is still that foolish, beautiful hope that there could be an us.

But you are distance now.

Not gone. Worse than gone— close enough for my heart to remember, too far for my hands to reach.

You are the sun to a root.

You reach down and I grow. Everything green in me is your doing. And no root has ever touched the sky.

And I do not reach.

Not because the wanting has gone quiet. It has not. But I have been the house someone set alight while swearing they were keeping it. I know what that smoke is worth. I will not carry a match toward anything I was not given.

So I stay where I am standing— higher than she buried me, which is your gift and your verdict both.

I keep my hands down. And I love you the way the earth loves light: completely, from below, at the only distance that was ever offered— and I do not close it.