Way before the sun rose,
I looked out beyond the trees
and the gray mist, soft and merciless,
wrapped around everything.
A quiet reminder that some absences
never really leave,
they just learn to settle in the corners
of our breath.

I didn’t realize how much it would hurt.
How much I would miss
the feelings that once lived
so easily between us.
The laughter we once shared
still echoing in places I don’t visit often,
yet somehow always find me
in the hush before morning.

Hope was once etched onto our collective,
a gentle presence,
a knowing
that love, in all its fragile stubbornness,
mattered.

And so, in this mist
heavy with memory,
threaded with the ghosts of what was
I light a small candle.
A fragile flame
against an endless gray.

May it flicker toward you,
may it sparkle,
may it find the place
where you were,
and whisper that you are still here
in the quiet spaces
I carry.