It was never you who left.
It was the chair forgetting
the weight of your body,
the cup learning
how to grow cold alone,
the clock still manufacturing minutes
for a man who no longer required tomorrow.
Loss never arrives through the door.
It settles inside the dust,
the untouched cup,
the empty side of the bed
that still remembers
the shape of an ancient miracle.
I waited for years,
as railway tracks wait
for a train
cancelled before it ever had a chance to exist.
They called me patient.
Yet rust also resembles patience
when no one watches iron
for long enough.
Too late,
I discovered that longing
is not loving the one who has gone.
It is continuing a conversation
with the version of ourselves
that died
on the very same afternoon.
There are trees
that survive winter.
Men do not.
We merely learn
to dress our ruins more elegantly,
to smile
through a fractured voice,
to pour coffee for strangers
without revealing
the graveyard
we carry beneath our ribs.
If you ever return,
do not knock.
Come in quietly,
the way seasons arrive
without asking permission.
You may find
only a man beside the window.
Or perhaps not even him.
For sometimes,
the last one to leave
is never the one who walks away—
but the one
who remains.