Category: Writing

Quiet water,
still and understood.
No storm,
no thunderous clash of waves,
but whispering ripples.
Slow and steady,
hidden under the willow tree.

Letting them fester,
not some quiet act of grace,
but abandonment,
dressed in silence.

When avoidance is the habit,
truth becomes a threat.

Unspoken,
not for lack of words ,
but for lack of courage.
Resentment, a soft dust,
settling into weight.

When the collapse came,
there was no attempt to mend,
only withdrawal.
No ointments and bandages,
but a snip with sharp shears,
a liberating shedding of an old skin.

The pain lies not in the criticism,
but in the silence that preceded it.
There was no unwillingness to grow,
only the absence of a chance.

A truth once lived within me.
That I could carry discomfort,
could take hard truth,
could respect boundaries,
could treat fatigue gently.

The truth is now fragile and
silence makes ghosts.
They walk in my sleep,
leaving fragments of cold declarations,
unveiling mistakes never understood.

The fear of unspoken lists,
quietly compiling somewhere.
A hundred nothings,
that mean everything.

The soil had been tended with care,
each seed placed with eager expectancy.
There was a time when rain felt like presence,
when something real stirred beneath the surface.

The garden held promise,
even as the leaves began to dull.
Roots reached into tired ground,
searching for what was no longer offered.

Some things fade
not with storms,
but with silence.

The gate stayed open.
No one came.
Water was given
long after planting had stopped.

The truth hid in the weeds.
This was no longer shared earth.
One had stopped growing here,
long before the other knew to stop tending.

From the neighbors’ garden,
there is radiance now,
joy spoken often and loud—
as if to prove
the soil only spoiled in specific presence.

Now, among the overgrowth,
a figure learns to move differently.
To let go of vines
that only pull
without offering bloom.

Steps begin to press into new ground.
There is caution.
There is attention.

There is grief.
There is the slow return
of something like clarity.

And perhaps,
when the seasons shift again,
there will be room
to learn the names
of those who tend nearby.
But for now,
nurturing the soil within,
and the roots already held close.