My hand still reaches for the page with bloodshot eyes and shaking fingers, because grief has taught me that pain unattended will rot beneath the floorboards and call itself haunting. It claws its way upward. It gnaws at the ankles of the living. It demands a witness the way a wound demands air. Even now, sorrow crawls from the grave in my own voice, begging to be named before it disappears entirely.

Perhaps that is why I wrote so much of myself into ruin.

Every page a small autopsy.

Every poem another attempt to keep something dead from dying twice.

But love has never arrived inside me with the same violence.

It hangs low and silver in my chest, like moonlight stretched across dark water. Untouched by language. Untroubled by whether or not it is seen. The moon does not ask the ocean to acknowledge its pull in order to move the tide.

It simply does.

And maybe that is why the pages remain empty now. Because to write grief is to exhume it, to drag it weeping into the light so someone, anyone, will say yes, I see it too.

But love has no interest in being witnessed.

Only felt.

-May 10th 2026

2:51 pm