I folded our small Sundays into paper boats, set them in the bathtub where the water never learned to move. I kept the ticket stubs on my wall like talismans, each crease remembering the way you laughed at the rain. The walls keep the smell of afternoons— soft and tired— but I stopped keeping score of how we broke, and who left. I learned the language of empty rooms, syllable by syllable, and still your name was the meter I forgot how to drop. I forgive the leaving — I forgive the way it happened. I keep a box of better reasons on a shelf I’ve yet to reach. When I let you go, I planted room to grow, I turned the ache into soil, and I learned to pull my roots toward light. I didn’t lose the map— just changed the road I trusted, and now I carry our kindness like a lamp when nights rehearse. I put the photographs in frames that breathe again, not to look back, but so the colors remember how to be. People say forgiveness is an easy coat to wear, they never say how to wash it when the rain is salt. There’s a noise in the morning — not all it used to be — I learned to walk where the floorboards used to sing your name. Sometimes the city hums like an instrument I don’t yet play, but my fingers have found new melodies to save. (I am learning stitches for the ragged places — I will not fold the whole of me into a lesser shape.) When I let you go, I built a doorway wide enough to breathe, I traded fear for open hands and something like a quiet vow. You get the better mornings — I want that without regret, and I will stand and grow, even when the wind forgets my name. I thought my edges would always hold you— but the world is long; it asks more than one heart can keep. (But I will not shrink to keep your light— I will widen — I will become the room you only ever needed.) I gave my all into the weight, I gave my heart the words — (—now I keep the light for me, and I keep a wish for you.) When I let you go, the horizon became a hand I could hold, I planted every sorrow like a seed that knows the sun. I carry no regret — only the wish that finds you well, and I will stand, and I will not fall apart for good. “I will stand... I will stand...”
