What we still have

The love we had
for those short years,
most people won’t get

in a lifetime.

There’s an emptiness now,
lingering beneath my happiness,
quiet,
the way a bitterness
tastes sweet,
only to us.

I catch myself reaching for you,
my hand going
to an empty side of the bed,
or lighting a candle at church,
in a life,
wide
and unfamiliar.

My kids are getting older
on the years I still get to have,
and they might think I’m sad
because you’re gone,
but I feel you in all of them—
in the shape of a nose,
in a curve of a smile,
a stubbornness I used to fight in you
and now just call
their father’s.

I don't cry the way I used to.

It's smaller than that—
it's setting the table for one less plate
it's your song in the car,
it’s the number five showing up
in obscure places,
it’s old photographs still on the shelf.

Only a few find that kind of love,
amid the ordinary noise of years.

Others spend

their

whole

lives

looking

but it never comes.


A negative space
in my soul,
now a second room
in the house
of me—
door always slightly open,
light from all the joy
I’ve built since,

still finding its way in,

but even on the good days,
or the settled ones,
I am never standing
in a house
that’s fully lit.