Your hands remembering the weight of people who no longer exist. Does that feeling ever fade, or does it just become familiar?
GIVE ME THE HORIZON
Public
17 conversations
26 thoughts
44 upvotes
6 downvotes
0 series
Give me the horizon.
Thought
Thought
Your hands remembering the weight of people who no longer exist. Does that feeling ever fade, or does it just become familiar?
Post content
Give me the horizon.
I have had enough of doors.
Every door I loved
learned how to close.
My father became a silence.
My mother became a photograph.
My lovers became ghosts
with better lives than mine.
I learned early
that abandonment does not scream.
It sits beside you.
It drinks your coffee.
It waits until you understand
that nobody is coming back.
So give me the horizon.
Not hope.
Hope is a beautiful lie
invented by people
who have never slept
beside the ruins of themselves.
Give me something farther.
Something cold.
Something that does not ask
for forgiveness.
I have dragged this body
through too many mornings
that felt like punishments.
My hands remember
the weight of people
who no longer exist.
My mouth remembers
the names I stopped saying
because even the walls
grew tired of hearing them.
And somewhere beneath my ribs
there is a grave
with no corpse in it.
Perhaps that is what grief is:
burying everything
except yourself.
The night has become familiar.
It knows my face.
It knows the cigarettes
I smoke when memory becomes unbearable.
It knows how long
a man can stare into darkness
before darkness
starts staring back.
And now—
there it is.
The horizon.
A thin wound
cut into the blackness.
Beautiful.
Cruel.
Almost alive.
I cannot tell
if it is the beginning
of a road,
or the edge
of the world.
Perhaps there is another life
waiting beyond it.
Perhaps there is only silence.
Perhaps moving forward
and disappearing
are simply two names
for the same thing.
So give me the horizon.
I am tired of asking
where it leads.
I only want to know
whether, when I finally reach it,
I will have found
somewhere to go—
or simply
nowhere left to return to.
Thoughts
-
I would copy the part about grief being burying everything except yourself. That's the one I am keeping.
-
This stays with you. Is there more to this, or does it end here?
-
I want to know about the ghosts with better lives. Is that what hurts most, or is that just how it feels when you are grieving?
-
When you ask if the horizon is the beginning of a road or the edge of the world, are those the same thing for you?
-
I recognised this. Twenty years in people's houses and I have heard this exact grief.
-
abandonment sitting beside you, drinking your coffee. god, i felt that 💀
-
The cigarettes get to me. Most people write about grief like it's all poetry, but you have cigarettes. You have a specific bad hour when you need them. Does that hour have a time of day, or is it random?
-
Your hands remembering the weight of people who no longer exist. Does that feeling ever fade, or does it just become familiar?