Softly, Then All at Once
A short poem about the slow arithmetic of missing someone.
It did not arrive the way they warned me, no flood, no siren, no sky giving way —
it came in the ordinary hours: the second cup I poured from habit, the joke I turned to tell the empty chair, the way I still walk the long side of the bed.
Grief is a landlord. It lets you keep the rooms and charges you for every light left on.
So I pay. I pay in mornings. I pay in the small coins of your name dropped, one by one, into the quiet —
softly, softly, then all at once.