the river breaks open (like ribs)
unmaking the earth in quiet tongues,
it flows unendingly:
she
does
not.

each stone hums her absence (or mine?)
while its waters slip soft knives
between the spaces where a heart
once folded neatly into hers.

the lake is still, an unfinished
sentence—its surface holds nothing
but sky, which has always been
indifferent. I do not reach
into its shallow silence;
I know it would not forgive me.

(oh
the sea).
each wave rises only to fall,
its breath (a sob, a scream, a sigh)
pulling the shoreline apart grain
by aching grain—
and i stand
where foam clings to my feet,
wanting
to
follow.

i write of the water because
it moves and I cannot.
because the tide swallows her name
and spits it back (broken,
empty,
wrong).

grief is not a thing
it is everything
it is the way my chest
folds in on itself like a ruined map.
it is the sharp edges of nothing
scraping against everything
until only this ache remains.

and when the river hums, when the lake stills,
when the sea pulls me open
just to leave me raw,
i know—
absence is the heaviest thing
i will ever hold.

I tried to build a world from quiet moments—  
small, whispered things that barely held their shape.  
But everything ran together,  
blurred like wet ink on skin,  
and I stopped knowing where it started,  
or when it stopped being mine.  

You once asked me what it felt like  
to carry the weight of so much.  
I said it wasn’t heavy—just scattered,  
like leaves caught in the wind,  
never settling, never landing  
where I thought they would.  

But somewhere in the chaos,  
I found stillness,  
a soft gravity that kept pulling me back,  
not to the things I’d lost,  
but to the things that stayed,  
the ones that never needed names.  

There’s a pull to what we don’t say,  
and maybe that’s where the truth rests.  
Not in the grasping, not in the struggle,  
but in the letting go—  
in the acceptance  
that some things are meant to drift,  
to settle in places we never thought to look.  

The edges of this world I’ve made are still rough,  
but now, they feel right.  
I’ve found peace in their sharpness,  
in the way they’ve held together despite the breaking.  
Even the void, it turns out,  
has a sweetness  
when you stop trying to fill it.

Somewhere, in a field of static snow,
a violin lies unplayed,
its strings breathing the hushed tension
of storms caught between clouds.
The bow, discarded, angles like a broken wing
bent under a sky so gravid with noise
it forgets to weep.

Each string hums an unspoken question:
Why does silence gather such gravity?
The wood remembers a hand
that carved hymns from the void,
its grain bearing witness
to the weight of creation.

I watch from afar,
a shadow swallowed by dusk,
where soundless specters rise
from the soil's yawning absence.
Their mouths are mirrors,
reflecting only the things
we dare not say aloud.

Once, I held the bow myself,
my breath the metronome of eternity.
Each note spilled from my trembling hands
like the lifeblood of gods
we did not mean to summon.
Their voices still echo,
fragile filigrees caught
in the harp of my ribs.

Now, even my shadow refuses me.
The light fractures around it,
falling into the fissures
between longing and despair.
Still, the violin waits,
its patience the only hymn
worth singing.

I bend to pick it up—
the silence shatters.
Each shard catches the light,
spinning a constellation
of unplayed songs.

And in the final note,
a blade of sound cuts through me,
splitting marrow from bone,
memory from dream.
The echo hangs like a question
only the dead might answer,
and I am left to wonder
if it was ever meant to be played at all.