Where the Sun and Moon Meet Again: A Poem of Hope & Misery

When In Mourning – by Maxwell

There are nights where grief does not arrive softly.

It kicks the door open.

Sits heavy in your ribs.

Breathes smoke into your lungs until even breathing feels borrowed.

And here I am again,

curled beneath a ceiling that does not know my name,

asking questions the dark never answers.

Was it leaving love

or surrender?

Was silence mercy

or punishment?

My chest aches like an abandoned church,

hollow and echoing,

full of prayers too bruised to rise.

I drown without water.

Funny, isn’t it?

How tears can fill a room faster than rain.

How loneliness is not the absence of a body,

but the absence of one specific heartbeat

beside your own.

I think of him in fragments.

The softness.

The sharpness.

The way love and hurt braided themselves together

until I no longer knew which strand was cutting me.

He was careless.

He was gentle.

Cruel in small ways.

Tender in others.

A storm that knew my name and my pain by memory.

And god, I miss him.

Not in the pretty way poems talk about missing people.

Not in pressed flowers or fading photographs.

I miss him like an amputated limb misses itself.

Like phantom pain.

Like waking up reaching for warmth

and finding only cold sheets and the awful stillness of morning.

Some nights I replay the beautiful moments

like old film burning through a projector,

trying to convince myself it’s real.

That we had no problems.

That the laughter mattered even if the ending bled.

Maybe this separation is a graveyard.

Maybe it is a garden.

Maybe both things grow from the same soil.

Because somewhere beneath all this ruin,

beneath the suffocating dark and the blistered ache of becoming,

a small stubborn thing still survives inside me.

Hope.

Not loud.

Not bright.

Nothing cinematic.

Just a flicker.

A match trembling in cold hands and a sorrowful heart.

Hope that pain is not permanent.

Hope that broken things learn new shapes.

Hope that one day he finds gentleness within himself,

and I find peace within myself,

and maybe the universe, strange and merciful,

let’s our souls meet again when we are no longer bleeding onto each other.

Waiting until we heal.  Take this and use it for good.  For that blissful hope.

Until then,

mourning will sleep beside me.

I will wake with grief tangled in my throat.

I will carry his ghost through grocery stores, traffic lights, quiet afternoons.

But I will keep moving.

I have too.  He has too. 

All for this magical day where stars shine bright, and the sun and moon fit perfectly together. 

The day where we lay next to each other again. 

I will work for that moment.

So, even wounded things crawl toward light