How to break

I made a house of myself for you.

Not of timber, nor stone, nor any honest thing,

but of pulse and breath,

of ribs bent into rafters,

of marrow burned down to candlelight.

I opened every window.

I left the doors unlatched through winter.

I called even my loneliness hospitality.

You entered as weather enters.

Without asking.

Without apology.

Your name moved through me

like rain through old cedar,

like smoke finding the highest beams.

I gave you the warmest room.

I gave you the chair nearest the fire.

I gave you the hidden key

to chambers I had not entered myself.

How holy it seemed then,

to be inhabited.

To hear footsteps in the corridors of the heart.

To set another plate upon the table

and call hunger by a gentler name.

Even silence was beautiful

when I believed it shared.

But love unanswered

does not leave all at once.

It thins.

It frays at the hems.

It becomes the draft beneath the door,

the cup left untouched,

the stair that learns no second weight.

One morning the curtains stir

though no hand has passed.

One evening the lamp burns low

for no returning.

I kept the place for you too long.

I swept the floors of memory.

I polished each small kindness

until it shone brighter than truth.

I mistook your absence for distance,

your indifference for sorrow,

your closed mouth for some deep wound

I might yet kiss open.

Outside, seasons gathered and fell.

Vines climbed the porch.

Rain entered where devotion had cracked the roof.

In the cellar, grief grew roots.

Still I said stay,

though only your shadow obeyed me.

There are ruins the eye can see,

and ruins carried under the skin.

Mine looked like laughter at supper.

Mine answered when spoken to.

Mine folded towels, paid bills,

remembered birthdays, watered the fern.

No passerby would have guessed

how the hallways sagged inside me.

Now you are nowhere,

which is where you always were.

And I walk from room to room

touching what remains.

Here the wall where hope leaned too hard.

Here the bed where prayers went unslept.

Here the threshold where pride died quietly

rather than ask to be chosen.

Still, something lives.

Not the old longing.

That pale tenant has gone at last.

But a strange new tenderness

moving through the broken places

like dawn through a burned house.

The beams blackened, yet standing.

The windows empty, yet full of sky.

I mourn not only losing you,

but the self who believed

being loved meant being entered,

emptied, consumed.

I gather her now

like dishes after a feast that never happened.

I wash each one by hand.

I set them back in the cupboard

for no guest at all.

Tonight I bolt every door.

I bank the fire for my own cold.

I lie down in the chambers of my body

and listen.

At last,

someone is home.