Life After Love

When love leaves... It does not depart like a storm. Storms announce themselves with thunder and fury. Love leaves more cruelly than that. It exits like the tide, quietly stealing pieces of the shore until one morning you look within yourself and realize entire landscapes have gone missing.

Yet, life after love is a strange place.

For a while, you wander it as a ghost haunting your own bones. You set two cups upon the table before remembering there is only one mouth left to drink. You reach for a hand in the dark and find only the cold inheritance of empty sheets. You hear a song and feel grief rise in your chest like a cathedral of water, because memory is merciless... It preserves the smallest things. The laugh. The pause before a kiss. The way they spoke your name as though it were a prayer heaven had whispered only to them.

But time... Sweet, thieving time... does not heal as poets often swear.

It transforms.

For one day, you shall stand beneath a golden evening sky and discover your heart no longer bleeds where it once split apart. The wound remains, yes, but now it resembles an old river carved through stone. A place where pain once raged, and beauty quietly grew afterward.

For life after love is not the end of the tale.

No, darling soul... Life after love is learning that the moon still rises, though no one stands beside you to witness it. It is finding laughter waiting in rooms you believed sorrow had purchased forever. It is discovering that your heart, though once given away with trembling hands, was never a thing another person could carry from you.

Perhaps the most tragic, lovely truth of all... Some people are not written into our story to stay. Some are comets.

They arrive blazing through the darkness, setting fire to the heavens of us, changing forever the shape of our nights... and then they disappear.

Yet we spend the rest of our lives looking upward, not because they remained... But because once, for a little while, they taught us where to find the stars.

The stars have drawn themselves across my skies, a quilt of silver stitched by grieving hands; they wrapped me where your vanished sunlight dies, and warm the winter left upon my lands.

What creature walks with footsteps made of rain, and drinks from wells no mortal eye can see? I think it sorrow, clothed in tender pain, still making hollow homes inside of me.

For I have searched the moon for borrowed grace, to mend the cracks your leaving carved in stone; yet moons are liars with their borrowed face... they shine by light they never called their own.

If I heal, perhaps I heal this way: Like dawn... Still born of night, yet seeking day.