Soul Severed

My soul is severed fabric, torn—caught on the immovable, threads still reaching for what has already gone. There is a version of me permanently seated at thirteen, knees pulled in, waiting for you to walk in with certainty that everything unbearable could still be handled. In the pause after something good happens my mouth already forming your name before I remember there is nowhere to send it. In the instinct to stand a little straighter when I make a decision, as if you are still somewhere in the doorway watching without announcing it. I wish you were here to comfort me like you used to. No one ever does it like you do. Though you are the root of all my suffering That is the price I pay for eternally loving you. I am almost your age and the candles I light each year lean toward one side, Nineteen hangs off me wrong, a coat taken from your shoulders still warm at the collar, sleeves swallowing my hands whole. I keep gathering what broke, pressing the pieces together with hands that tremble, though one fragment refuses its place, lifting—light, disobedient slipping past the reach of my fingers before I can close around it. It thins as it rises until there is nothing left to hold but the space it occupied, and I sit with it that absence shaped exactly like something I knew feeling the rest of it soften, edges giving way, structure turning unreliable beneath my grip. The hours do not stay where I set them. They over-ripen and collapse inward, what remains stains everything it touches, leaving my hands empty, and waiting for something to return that has already learned how not to. Still, I reach into air long enough to place you where you were and keep you there. I cannot ask you questions twice or wait for answers I was never old enough to remember or possibly never meant to know. Because I cannot keep every part of you from time, I hold what time has not been able to take. So, throughout the years I add on Yet you can never be replaced For I know that I will everlastingly ache But every now and then Your presence reminds me That I’ll see you again.