Elegy for a Season That Didn’t Announce Its Leaving

Elegy for a Season That Didn’t Announce Its Leaving

It did not leave with a door closing,

no clean hinge of sound to mark the hour.

Instead, it thinned

like breath on glass, fading

before you realise you’ve stopped speaking.

There were signs, of course.

The chair by the window gathered light

No one sat in.

The kettle learned patience,

boiling longer than it should,

waiting for a hand that no longer reached.

At first, I mistook it for quiet.

The kind that comes after rain,

when the world holds itself still

to listen to what it has become.

But this was not that.

This was a subtraction

that kept subtracting.

Your name stayed in the house

in the way the hallway leaned toward evening,

in the soft complaint of the third stair,

in the coat that remembered your shoulders

better than I could.

I tried to measure the loss in objects:

one cup unused,

one side of the bed undisturbed,

One voice missing from the ordinary choir

of days that used to overlap and hum.

But loss is not arithmetic.

It is the echo that changes the room,

the way space relearns itself

around an absence it cannot refuse.

Sometimes it gathers in small places

the pause before laughter,

The second plate I almost took down,

the word “we”

arriving out of habit

and leaving corrected.

Other times it is as wide as the weather.

It moves through me without asking,

a season that has forgotten how to end,

only how to return

in different shapes.

I do not ask it to resolve.

Instead, I keep what remains

the way you once turned toward light,

the quiet certainty of your footsteps,

the warmth that lingers in objects

long after touch has gone.

If I listen carefully,

There is still something speaking

not you, not anymore,

But the space you altered

continuing its slow, patient telling.

And I am learning,

not to answer,

But to hear it.