Frozen Emotions

So slowly, like glaciers forgetting their own movement,
my newly found friend shared feelings that had thinned over years,
not shattered in a single storm,
but worn down little by little,
like waves sanding a name from stone
until even memory could not pronounce it.

At work he became an unlit hallway,
after the meeting where his efforts were folded away
like a map no one needed,
his voice a chair left empty,
his purpose a clock whose hands refused to argue.

Ambition once burned bright as a forge,
now it cooled into iron. heavy, unyielding, silent.

Rejection drafted climates of deeper cold:
a first date declined, casual as a shrug,
yet it landed like snowfall in lungs
where breath once came easy.

A college letter, pale and indifferent,
closed like a winter sky at noon,
no thunder, just absence.

The uniform he imagined creased with pride
never touched his skin;
instead, he wore the quiet of “unfit,”
tailored in measurements of unseen lack.

Proposals of all kinds offered like fragile glass birds
were met without flight,
each “no” a freezing rain
coating his outstretched hands
until he could no longer feel
what he had been trying to give.

The one highlight that had made its way through

So much to reach his heart became but another

loss arriving not as storms, but as an erasure:
a newborn’s silence, vast as a universe that forgot sound,
his wife’s abrupt last breath echoing like footsteps
in a house that refused to remember her name,
and somewhere beyond that,
his will to live dimmed like a star no one noticed fading.

Now he sits, a man shaped from winter,
in a chair worn into the outline of his waiting.
A dog rests its head upon his lap,
warmth pressing gently against the frost.
His tears fall, quiet as thaw, onto a patient nose
as his dog leans in, licks the man’s hand, his face,
as a tail moves like a slow metronome of mercy.

In that small, faithful rhythm,
something cracks, almost imperceptibly,
until a slight smile unfolds,
fragile, unfamiliar,
but more than he has felt
for a very long time.

With his emotions once again finding purchase,

we left that bar.  He knew not what influence his story

had created for my own state of unresolved feelings.