What Remains - POEM

What Remains

There are rooms I no longer enter,

not because they are locked,

but because the air remembers you too well.

Your mug still sits on the shelf,

facing slightly east,

as if waiting for your hand

to lift it back into morning.

I don't move it.

I don't touch the dust that gathers around it.

It feels sacred,

like the silence after someone says goodbye

but hasn’t really left yet.

I speak to you sometimes

when the house is quiet enough

to believe you might answer.

Just a whisper,

just your name

folded into breath.

Grief has no sharp edge.

It is soft,

persistent,

like water wearing down stone—

a slow undoing of the self.

You are everywhere and nowhere.

In the corner of a laugh,

in the way light filters through the curtains.

In the ache that has no name

but always knows its way home.

And still,

life asks me to move forward

with arms full of absence.