Lessons Awakened in Darkness

Loss does not knock.

It arrives like a tide that forgets the moon,

pulling back the shoreline of everything familiar.

Last night…

The morning folded itself into a paper crane and flew into the dark,

 its wings stitched from promises not yet spoken.

Where once the sky held the breath of sunrises,

now it hangs like a canvas rinsed in charcoal,

clouds swollen with the weight of unshed memory.

In the hush between yesterday and now,

 the stars blinked out one by one,

never extinguished,

but swallowed by the silence that drapes itself over the bones of time.

I woke to a world…

Where fog had rewritten the horizon,

where the compass of my soul spun without pointing home.

The winds…

That once whispered comfort now speak in foreign tongues.

And I?

A vessel adrift, cradled by the ache of absence.

Still…

We lean into the night of tomorrow,

as if it were a door left ajar,

hoping the hinge creaks an inviting entrance to something unnamed

 but waiting.