I make peace with death in waves. In a call missed, in the shaky rattled tone of another impermanent’s voice clothed in fear, in the leather-tightened and knotted hands of a mother greater than you and I.

These waves have crashed again, and again, and again since you’ve been gone.

A heightened heartbeat thumps loudly in my sweltered hot ears while a knot in my throat sits just above my heart, shallowing my breath, allowing scarce space for my own life to continue.

It’s heavy. Somehow the drumming rings so tall, yet the cavernous depths trench throughout my sternum, the pain so deep it’s disgusting. A sickeningly cruel joke to have been able to love someone so deeply at all.

I spend many moments remembering your voice as clear as a light blue summer sky. Your favorite color was blue and you always told me not to stare at the sun, it would burn my eyes and turn me blind. I can hear the smirk at the end of each word when you answered the phone, the tone of true love when you sang about the bunnies and you giggled, bumping us on the head.

Mamma, you haven’t answered that phone in a very long time.

I suppose you leaving prepared me for all the different ways they would leave, too. Nothing could ever feel the same.

The air is silent and unwavering, while a buzz substitutes its normal liquid movements around all of the material entities that are tossed about the yard. It’s our HVAC unit reminding us we have finally received the so-longed for heat of summer.

In the farthest corners of my vision, this little man stalks his prey. His movements are calculated, shoulder blades tucked in and low to the ground making a visual slow rumble with each step, articulated and soft. He snatches a small bug, chomping through the intermittently shining life that symbolized dusk.

He has made his way through another long day of hunt and play, and now it is time to rest. His slender body lays flat against the still dew ridden ground. Weeks of rainy spring time unrest soaked through the shallowest layers of the earth, helping cool his belly from this long awaited sun.

His fur is as black as the void, but in the summer light you can see the tawny undertones, representing his many ancestors of perfect predators before him. He revels, proud of his simple accomplishments of the day, and for a moment, I too find myself able to kick back and appreciate the similar opportunities that can be so easily taken for granted.

She wasn’t planted with care or design,

No hand chose this patch of ground.

She rose through the rubble, cracked and dry,

Where silence was the loudest sound.

They called her a weed—unwanted, wild,

Too tangled to be tame.

But they never saw the quiet work

It took to bloom from pain.

Each petal carries pieces of

The wounds she used to bear,

Each leaf a scar that learned to green

From long-forgotten care.

The rain did not arrive with grace—

It thundered through her chest.

But even storms can wash the soul,

And give a seed its rest.

She healed in secret, slow and sure,

While no one thought she could.

She found a kind of rooted peace

That gardens never would.

Now she blooms in colors strange,

Too bright for some to see.

But she is proof that healing grows

Where wild things choose to be.

I left with nothing but silence.

The kind that echoes in an empty house in a storm,

after screaming winds and crying clouds have gone.

Leaving broken doors and cracked windows,

the last, cruelest, final goodbye.

I always thought love meant molding myself to fit inside someone’s idea of me,

but I outgrew the corners of your love.

Where your words yearned to keep me small-

shackled in your toxic embrace and desolate castle.

I danced barefoot through the ruins, across jagged stones and shattered glass,

aching with the weight of the love I gave you…

Softly,

like a fresh breath through dew soaked morning leaves,

she called to me, beckoning me back:

the girl I lost, buried beneath all of my ‘I’m sorries’ , the almosts, the excuses.

She didn’t ask where I’d been, only opened her arms and showed me that I was already whole.

She whispered the softest reminders,

no vows, no promises, no chains-

only the burning, raging silence, a quiet sonnet

that I am enough

and I always was

Now when I speak of love,

I speak of her.

When I speak of home,

I speak of coming home to her.

To myself.

I owe it to myself

and to you, I guess, in a far more impermanent form than I

to rejoice your life where death now deputizes

remembering a cascading smile and an unapologetic laugh,

an unapologetic look, warmth in a friendly embrace, that welcomed my adolescence.

your form so honest and genuine, accepting of all things weary, tattered, perfect and imperfect, dismantled by the hand of man

no longer here

and where am I to you?