There was once a child
born beneath the sign
of unburial.

She carried too much—
not in arms
but in tethered memory.
Things with no names,
only weights.

A cracked watch
that ticked in reverse.
A button from a coat
that no one had worn
in three generations.

A feather
from a bird
dreamt once
by her grandmother,
never seen again.

She believed—
as those marked by absence do—
that keeping meant remembering,
and remembering meant
nothing would vanish.

Others crossed her path,
offered to help unfasten the straps.
She refused.
They did not know
which talismans bled
and which only looked like wounds.

So she walked.
Through salt seasons,
through bone-rattling frost,
through forests with no floor
and skies that never asked her name.

The bag grew heavier.
She grew cleverer.
Silent.

And then—
on a day that wasn’t special,
under a sun that wasn’t kind—
she set it down.
Not as surrender.
As an experiment.

The earth did not crack.
The ghosts did not scatter.
Her shadow did not abandon her.

She sifted the contents.
Some were dust.
Some were still singing.
Some curled away like dried petals
and begged to be left behind.

She took a key.
She took the bell.
She left the rest
for the moss.

She walked on.

Not lighter, exactly—
but less governed
by the shape
of her grief.

to lie on the warm sand at twilight
ripples of fleeting light
across a calm sea.

You smiled
like I was worth the wait-
or the lie.
Couldn’t tell.
You left the kitchen light on too long.
I stepped inside.
The floor gave way.

I slept beside you
as a thief
-quiet,
not for comfort-
but for the hush
that comes
when no one asks
what you’ve done.

Your shoulder
held the part of me
that still wanted
to be forgiven.
I kissed you
like confession
with no priest,
no promise,
just heat and teeth.

You didn’t flinch.
Didn’t ask what made me
this way.
Didn’t try
to fix it.

I’ve burned names
like receipts.
I’ve swallowed shame
like spit.
Walked out
of too many mornings
with hands that still remember
who they touched
and didn’t deserve.

But you-
you just set a cup beside the bed.
No questions.
No sermon.
Just water.
Just presence.
Just mercy,
without the bow.
I drank the quiet.
It didn’t heal me,
but it stayed.

And when you sang-
not loud,
just soft enough to hold the air.
you said my name
like it was still mine.
Like it wasn’t
something I’d dropped
on purpose.
Like it could
come back.

Old man stands alone,
shirt undone,
hair silver and lifting,
the sky begins to split.

The storm enters
not with cruelty,
but with memory,
that deep breath before
the world unbuttons itself.

Thunder cracks like bones once young.
The rain walks sideways,
then vertical,
then all directions.
He does not move.

Was the storm that raised him,
not his father,
not a stiff lipped god behind a pulpit,
but this:
a violent choir of wind and water
tearing through the trees like language
he always understood
but never spoke.

Remembering it in his legs,
how the wind,
long ago,
swept him off roofs,
out of dry judgement,
into open roads and beds and truths.
How lightning never hit him,
but always pointed
and directed.

He once chased it,
barefoot,
drunk on youth and refusal,
beautiful clouds, black and blooming.
giving permission
to crack open,
wiping dullness off the skin
that last coat of sleep.

Now, old and alone,
he feels it again,
that holy silence between the strikes,
that rush of air through the ribs,
the kind that makes love and sin feel small.

The wind doesn’t ask where he’s been.
The rain doesn’t question strength.
They just take him in,
pulling his bones into a long, level song.

No one watching.
No one shouting him back inside.
Only black clouds
reaching low enough
to press their foreheads to his.

In that communion,
the unspoken pact between man and squall
he closes his eyes,
and lets go
of names, of time, of answers.

Only the storm
knows who he was.
Only the storm
still loves him for it.