The Sound That Left With You

I knew.

Not the way

people mean knowing,

but the way

winter knows

the last leaf

is already gone

before it falls.

Your body

was learning

how to leave

and mine

kept pretending

it was staying.

I looked for you

every morning

as if looking

could argue

with time.

As if love

was something

that could negotiate

with endings.

I wasn't there

the night it happened.

Just a door.

Just a return.

Just a sentence

waiting in the air.

“He’s gone.”

No thunder.

No breaking sky.

Only the weight

of two words

settling into a house

that suddenly

didn’t know

what to do

with silence.

Your bowl

still waited.

The garden

still opened itself

in your direction.

Even the air

kept shaping itself

for a sound

that would not come.

You meowed

at everything.

As if the world

was worth responding to.

As if being alive

was reason enough

to speak back.

You snored

like certainty.

Like nothing

could ever change.

I used to cover my ears.

Now I listen

for what I can’t have back.

Fifteen birthdays.

Fifteen Christmas mornings.

Fifteen years

of being chosen

without question.

This year

I turn twenty-one

and no one

will count

the absence

beside me.

They say

it was a long life

for something small.

But love

does not measure size

or time.

Only presence.

I keep replaying

that night

trying to find

a version of the world

where I arrive sooner

where goodbye

is something

we both get to hold.

But grief

does not rewrite gently.

It only leaves

what it cannot undo.

So I carry

the gardens.

The water.

The meowing

at nothing at all.

The ordinary magic

of being followed

through a life.

Because maybe love

was never about

the last moment.

Maybe it was always

about every moment

that came before it.

And if that is true,

then you were never

left behind.

You were only ever

loved forward.