In The Quiet Places

I didn’t cry at your funeral.
I don't know why.
It’s been years now, and sometimes I imagine you, still there in the fog,
walking to the mailbox at your home in Washington.

Maybe we could go out to your garden again,
where we'd wear grocery bags over our feet.
Remember all the mist, Grandma?
Or finding the sand dollars on the shore?

After you went home, I don’t know.
Maybe, I feared looking too closely—
to touch that hidden part of me,
the part that remembers, aches, and grieves.

Years passed and the shadow of my basement,
it became a familiar friend to me.
I hid myself, like I always do,
turning from hands that tried to reach me,
hands that may have even needed me.

I am a selfish man, and I don't mean to be.
I am a man that is not only afraid of his own heart,
but I am a man afraid to leave his own house.
I reach for you in the silence, in the cracks
between breath and thought—
and sometimes, in that stillness, I feel you:
a warmth, soft as the light
that slips beneath the doors I've closed,
and locked myself behind.

They say grief is love with nowhere to go,
but my heart holds this endless weight,
this quiet ache that speaks only in whispers.

If grief is love without a place to rest,
then let mine be a garden grown in sorrow,
where every memory of you finds root,
and where, in time, I may learn to bear the fruit
of love, comparable to the depth in
which you gave to me.