I ran
From my problems
They came back
But I didn’t
In a way
I’m still trapped
In that night
Cowered in a corner
Arms over my head
“I’m sorry”
“I’m sorry”
But you wouldn’t listen
Couldn’t
I ran
But my problems followed
They came back
I came back

If paper and pen
understand me to my core,
then it is my voice that betrays me evermore.
I know better, yet opening up
stays my biggest fear.
I am surface-leveled,
neither there, nor here.
And so comfortably, with no fuss,
I stay a projection,
nothing more than dust.
I am your imagination,
no depth,
no width.
I am only but a shell.
An empty figure,
stripped of will and vigor.

It came like weather.
No origin.
No request.

Just a shift in pressure
    inside the skin.
And something
  started speaking
    through my hands.

It wasn’t mine.
Not the phrase.
Not the image.
Not the ache it left.

But it needed a body
  to pass through.
And mine
  was open
    enough.

There are moments
when I read back what I wrote
  and feel
    like a stranger
    with my own voice.

Not confused.
Not proud.
Just…
  borrowed.

I don’t always know
 what I’m doing.
But sometimes,
 not knowing
  is what lets it happen.

Call it muse.
Call it current.
Call it memory
      from before this life.

I don’t need to name it.
Just not get in the way.

It knocked
softly
a breath at the door
but I
bolted the windows
and swallowed the key.

It came wearing warmth,
but I mistook it
for fire,
for teeth,
for grief with a new face.

So I fled,
faster than joy
could reach out its hand
afraid it might feel
like home.

Some things are too whole
to be spoken.

A look.
A breath that almost turned into speech.
The way your shoulder moved
  before the apology
  that never arrived.

We speak so much
  just to hide
  what we actually feel.

But the unsaid -
 it sits quietly
 in the space behind your teeth,
 in the silence between names.

It doesn’t fade.
It settles.

I remember the pause
 more than the sentence.
The moment before
 you almost said
    “don’t go.”

But didn’t.

And that
  has echoed longer
    than any goodbye.

What we don’t say
 doesn’t disappear.
It becomes
 the resonance
    beneath everything we do.

a rainy day
sky split open,
and i did too
quietly.
not sadness,
just the kind that stays
even after the storm.

One day
my hands will look like my mother’s—
and I wonder
if I’ll ever notice
the progression.

My daughter
will place her hand beside mine,
comparing landscapes
as though the veins and wrinkles
etched across my palms
were foreign elements,
strange and distant.

When the years
have piled high,
and I can finally say
I’ve been old
far longer than I was young,

perhaps I too
will place my hand beside
my granddaughter’s—
and study the difference
like a language
I was once fluent in.