To the Empty Spaces
To the empty spaces where warmth once lingered,
I send these words from the cavern of absence,
A heart carved hollow by loss that refuses to fade.
First, Father vanished–left a wound no time could stitch,
And now, Mother follows, the house folding in on itself,
Echoes multiplying in the dust where footsteps used to live.
What remains is silence, too heavy to carry,
And shadows that lean against walls like mourners who forgot how to leave.
Do you recall how laughter was currency here?
The way her perfume haunted the hallway–
A fleeting trace of her passing,
Or the cadence of her voice: steady, sure,
A melody that wrapped the world tight and safe.
Now the only song is the quiet,
And memory is a splinter,
Bright, jagged, sharp enough to bleed.
Each day is a knife-edge:
Moving forward is an act of war,
Every moment a struggle to keep from folding into the dark.
I clutch old memories, knuckles white,
Reaching through emptiness for a fragment,
A phantom touch or a whisper from rooms that now echo with nothing.
The world turns, uncaring,
Passing faces ask me to forget,
But grief cements itself in the bones–
How do you rebuild when the pillars have turned to dust?
Yet within this ache, there is something unbroken:
A brittle resilience that comes from loving and losing,
A reminder that they stitched their story into my veins,
That I carry pieces of their hope–
Tattered, imperfect, but alive.
They live on behind my eyes,
In the words I speak, the ways I endure,
A legacy of fierce love and unspoken fears.
I try to honor them, even when the ache is raw,
To walk upright, to stitch their lessons into the seams of my days.
So I gather what’s left–grief, memory, longing–
And build something new, brick by broken brick,
A mosaic that doesn’t hide the cracks,
But lets the light slip through in strange and unexpected ways.
Maybe, somewhere beyond the night,
They watch and nod,
Proud of the life I cobble together from the love they left behind.
I am a vessel of everything they were–
Haunted and held, wounded and strong,
Moving through the dark, holding on to the faintest glimmer,
Searching for a future that might, one day,
Feel like home again.
With the ache and the love that still fills these empty spaces,
The grieving child they left behind.