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.
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