Yesterday, the world wore softer edges. Troubles drifted like smoke above a distant fire— visible, yes, but never close enough to burn. I walked through days unscarred, believing the horizon would always wait, patient as an old friend who never asks why you’ve been gone so long. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. The smoke has settled in my lungs. Each breath tastes of ash and absence. The rooms I once filled with laughter now echo with the shape of someone missing. A chair pulled out but never occupied again. A cup left half-full on the sill, rainwater pooling where coffee used to be. Suddenly— not gradually, not mercifully, but in one clean, surgical cut— I am halved. Not the man who laughed too loud at nothing, not the one who believed love was a simple chord progression. A shadow clings where confidence used to stand. It has my posture, my walk, but none of my reasons to keep moving forward. Why she had to go, I still rehearse in the dark hours. Not because answers would heal, but because questions are the only tether left. I said something wrong— a word, a silence, a glance held one second too short. The fault feels both enormous and trivial, like blaming gravity for a fall. Now I long for yesterday the way a prisoner longs for the window he can no longer reach. Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play. We tossed it back and forth like summer light on water— no score kept, no fear of losing. Rules were invented on the spot and forgotten by morning. Now the board is cleared. Pieces scattered under furniture I can’t bear to move. I need a place to hide away— not from the world, but from the version of myself who still believes he could have played it differently. Oh, I believe in yesterday. Not as paradise, not as truth, but as the last place where I was whole enough to break cleanly. The fracture line is still visible if you look close: a hairline crack running through every tomorrow. We carry it forward like an heirloom scar— proof we were once careless enough to feel everything at full volume. And yet— in the quiet between heartbeats, I catch glimpses of mercy. Time does not erase; it refracts. What was lost returns in sharper focus: not to torment, but to teach. The troubles that seemed so far away were never distant—they were rehearsals for the courage it takes to stand in today’s light, half-shadowed, half-remembered, and still choose to sing. Yesterday is not a place to live. It is a lantern held behind us, illuminating just enough of the path ahead to keep us from walking blind. I believe in yesterday the way I believe in gravity: it pulls, it reminds, it keeps us tethered to earth so we can learn, finally, how to rise. (Spoken pause—let the final line linger.) So here I stand, not half the man, perhaps, but twice the witness. And that, maybe, is enough.
