Hollow Holding

October opens like a house you forgot you loved.

The door gives that tired little sigh it
only makes for you.

Inside, the air is cold enough to wake
your skin but warm enough to keep you.

There’s a feeling in the room, no noise.  just the quiet that happens when someone
familiar is nearby.

The leaves outside slip down the windows
in slow streaks, like they’re trying to remember your face.

A porch light glows before dinner, steady,
waiting.

The path through the woods isn’t new, but
it feels newly cleared, as if someone walked just ahead of you to make sure you
wouldn’t trip.

The fog does that thing where it lifts
right at your chest, giving you space to breathe.

And the wind leans. It listens. It
carries the warmth of a voice that haunts you in sleep.

There’s a place at the edge of the field
where the grass bends inward, a small hollow shaped exactly like the feeling of
being met halfway.

You stand there and October wraps around
you like a blanket someone left on the back of a chair for you to find.

Just a place where the air remembers how
you like to be held.

And somewhere in all that quiet, in all
that cold, in all that amber light that never quite dies,

there’s the sense of someone waiting.

Just being there in a way that feels like
home.