by Liam 

There comes a time

when the one who passed

is no longer away, yet there.

The room that once held their voice

begins to hold something else,

a tenderness without a name,

a quiet light resting

on the ordinary things.

And I discover

that absence has its own landscape.

At first, every path leads

to the places where she is not.

I reach instinctively

for the familiar hand,

the beloved voice,

the small rituals

that once made the world feel whole together.

But time, patient as the revolving earth,

begins its hidden work.

It does not remove the sorrow.

It teaches this loss

how to become spacious.

And slowly,

what was once a wound has become a window.

You begin to sense her

not in some distant elsewhere

but here.

in the warmth of morning light,

in the fragrance of rain,

in the gentle movement of your breath,

in the tenderness with which

your own hands now touch your art. 

Perhaps this is one of love’s

most mysterious gifts:

that what we cannot keep

we are never entirely asked to lose.

For love, once given deeply,

does not disappear with the body.

It changes its dwelling.

It leaves the visible world

and enters the unseen places

the chambers of memory,

the language of the heart,

the silence beneath the thoughts.

There, it asks but nothing.

It does not demand

that you remember.

It does not ask

that you grieve.

It simply remains.

And one quiet evening

you may notice

that you are no longer carrying

the weight of their absence.

You are carrying her presence.

Not as a burden, or loss

but as a blessing.

And breathing deeply,

you may understand at last

that the beloved has not vanished

She has become

part of the very light

through which I see.

And I am

…at peace.