A story about the presence of someone who is actually no longer here.
Mountain Echo
I call. You drift. Each day a fraction deeper into the mist.
I read your eyes the spark has moved to an address I do not know. Where does your heart sleep now?
I do not say it aloud, but it lives in the white space: I love you with a weight that breaks words.
You inhabit a room in my soul. The door stands ajar. Always.
And yet I hear the sigh of a draft announcing a gentle close.
Stay. Become a rhythm in my breath, a shadow that does not leave my light.
There was a moment when you chose me. It stands still. It does not age.
I have been blessed. I know the colour of happiness.
But fear grows slowly, like moss on a cold wall.
I reach for you as if distance were a substance I could push away with my hands.
The distance between us is not a road we can walk, but a landscape in which I lose my way while sitting beside you.
Come closer. Become solid again.
Without you I slip free from my own anchor.
The night already knows: I clutch a pillow as if it were an answer, as if it still breathed your name.
My hands search the air that refuses to take shape.
I gather the crumbs of your gaze. I save them for the winter already lodged in my bones.
If this is the edge of what we were, let me feel your nearness one more time, as if time itself has erred.
The silence where your heart now rests is a language I do not speak.
I bow. Not from weakness, but because I do not know how to carry the sky without you.
Stay. Or do not vanish completely. Leave a trace of light behind for without you I am not gone, but a sentence halfway.
(Translate from Dutch.)
