Unread II

And so

I come here

Digitally bent
with exhaustion

From you

From myself

From the endless labor
of translating a life
into something a stranger might recognize as their own

And from those who read me

My faithful witnesses

The ones who have learned
the weather of my language

Who know when a bird
is not a bird

When a doorway
is grief

When rain
is longing wearing a disguise

When a wound
has simply changed its name

They follow the migration
from the literal
into something far more alive

Not metaphor as decoration

Metaphor as resurrection

The ordinary transformed
until it begins breathing

Until a chair becomes absence

A house becomes memory

A river becomes devotion

A single feather
becomes an entire human life
trying to lift itself
from the earth

And what astonishes me still

Is that they come

Again and again

Not to consume the story

To inhabit it

To leave pieces of themselves
between the lines

To recognize a sorrow
I believed belonged only to me

And somehow return it less lonely

There is a sacredness in that

A quiet exchange

The oldest miracle I know

One human being saying

I have never lived your life

And yet I know this room

Perhaps that is why
I remain faithful to language

Even when it disappoints me

Even when it fails
to cross the distance

Even when I place
the most tender thing I possess
into another person’s hands

And hear only silence

Still

I cannot abandon it

A bird does not abandon the sky

A river does not abandon the sea

And I do not know
how to abandon words

They have carried me too far

Buried too many dead

Lit too many darkened rooms

Kept me alive
through too many winters

So I arrive here
carrying another fragment

Another shard of light

Another unfinished prayer

Not because I possess answers

Because I possess language

And language

When offered honestly creates a bridge
where there was only distance

A lantern
where there was only dark

A witness
where there was only solitude

Perhaps that is why I continue

Not for publication

Not for praise

Not even for understanding

I continue because somewhere beyond this glowing screen someone is waiting for the exact shape of a sentence that will make them feel less alone inside their own becoming

And if I can give them that

even once

then every unread letter

every unanswered question

every mile I have traveled
through the wilderness of myself has not been wasted

Because despite everything, despite the silences, despite the distances, despite all that language cannot save

I still believe

it saves something

and sometimes

something

is enough