Poetry

You are the pause between two heartbeats, the hush before the rain arrives. I have loved you in every language I never learned to speak. Even silence sounds different when you are the one beside me. Some loves are loud. Ours was always the quiet kind — the kind that stays.

Grief is a stone I carry in my pocket, smooth now from years of turning it over. Some mornings it is heavier than the whole of the sky. I do not try to put it down anymore. I have learned instead to carry it gently, the way you'd hold something that once was breakable.

The grass has gone the color of old paper. Even the wind sounds tired here, like it has said everything it meant to say. Winter comes slowly to the steppe, not as an ending but a long exhale — the whole land settling into its own quiet.

I folded my childhood into a suitcase and called it moving forward. Some nights I still hear the door I never really closed. Home is not a place I left. It is a room I carry, rearranged a little every time I remember it.

The river does not ask where it is going. It only knows the shape of the ground beneath it, and follows. Maybe love is less a decision and more a kind of gravity — you don't choose the direction, you just stop resisting it.

In one tongue I am gentle. In the other, I am exact. Between them lives a third self no one has met yet. I have made peace with being translated, imperfectly, over and over — still somehow whole each time.