No Chase

It does not come like a chase or a sound breaking into a room.

It gathers itself slowly, like weather deciding it has always belonged to the sky, like fog learning the outline of a field without ever touching the grass.

And I wait for it the way a shoreline waits for tide, not because it is promised return but because absence has its own rhythm.

You were never hunting me. You stood like a tree that refuses to lean, like a lantern that does not swing in the wind, like a page left open and still warm after the hand has gone.

That is what made it stay. Not force, but steadiness. Not reach, but nearness without effort.

And I mistook that stillness for distance at first, like mist mistaken for emptiness, like dusk mistaken for ending, like silence mistaken for nothing at all. But it was never empty.

It was full in the way held breath is full, in the way a held doorframe remembers every hand that passed through it.

Even now, it lingers in me, like rain remembered in soil, like sunlight caught in glass long after the sun has left the room.

It does not ask to be caught. It only asks to be near enough

that anticipation can learn its shape,

like a bird learning the air

without ever needing to land.