Hestia I lit the stove before the sun came up Just to hear the house breathe again The pipes knocked twice like tired knuckles And somewhere upstairs A door closed itself slowly I don’t know how to pray anymore Without sounding desperate The kitchen used to breathe You remember that? Steam on the windows Coffee burning because we forgot about it while laughing too hard The dog asleep beneath the table The crooked chair nobody fixed because “It still worked fine” Now every room sounds abandoned Before I even enter it The hallway light flickers Like it’s trying not to witness this The sink drips all night long And every little sound becomes another thing I cannot save She stopped singing while folding laundry Stopped touching my shoulder when she passed behind me Stopped asking if I’d be home for dinner And I kept acting like silence Wasn’t a language Hestia… Keeper of the small flame Tell me how a house dies this quietly Hestia! Please put warmth back in these walls! The windows freeze from the inside now And every photograph looks like a funeral I swear I will carry the fire myself Bare-handed if I have to Just don’t let this house die like this Don’t let love rot quietly in the dark Last week I found one of her hairs Caught in the sleeve of my winter coat And I sat on the basement stairs for an hour Holding it like relic ash Because isn’t that pathetic? How grief turns ordinary things sacred? The children still laugh sometimes But softer now Like they’re testing whether joy Is still allowed here And I hear them whisper at night Asking if we’re angry again God… No. Not God. Hestia. Keeper of soup pots And old wood floors And tired mothers And overworked fathers And homes that survive winter somehow… Please. Tell me what offering fixes this I swept the ashes from the fireplace today And underneath them There were still embers Hestia! I know this house remembers us! The walls still hold the shape of our voices The floorboards still ache beneath our footsteps So if there’s mercy in the firelight If there’s holiness in staying… Then teach me how to rebuild What pride and exhaustion burned down Because I am so tired of apologizing Through closed doors I am so tired of sleeping beside a ghost Who still has my favorite eyes I watched her standing at the sink tonight Moonlight through the blinds Striping her skin in pale blue lines And for one second… One impossible second… She looked exactly like the woman I built this life beside And I almost reached for her But fear is a cruel architect And we have spent years Building rooms inside ourselves The other cannot enter Hestia… If there’s still fire left here Please Help us find it Before the cold does.
