You will not know togetherness
until it is torn from you,
until it leaves behind
a silence so vast
it swallows even memory.
Separation is not a sudden cleaving;
it is the slow unweaving
of threads you did not know
held you.
It is the hollowing out
of a vessel whose fullness
you could never see—
only feel,
only live within,
like breath unnoticed
until the drowning.
There was a time, wasn't there,
when we were whole?
Or is this ache
the first knowing we've ever had—
a cruel inheritance
from a place we can no longer name?
Togetherness was not a thing we held.
It was the air between us,
the nameless bond,
a warmth we didn't think to call warmth
because it had no opposite then.
But now:
absence drapes itself across our shoulders,
its weight unbearable,
its shape impossible to forget.
What irony that loss
should teach us love.
What madness,
to learn the contours of what we were
only by the chasm left behind.
Is this punishment, or is it mercy?
To know, finally,
what we had
by the shadow of what we have lost.
