Carry On

Loved your shoes in the doorway. Loved you on the patio, morning sunlight curled around you like a halo. Did you take it with you? I’ve been waiting on golden light, waiting for it to spread through me, inky and light, but I’m as vacant as the moon waiting on warmth and summertime.

Sometimes the rain just keeps on coming.This grief like thunder and lightning, the way it rolls over me like a storm that steals the breath from my chest.

You were good. You are the reason I carry on. The reason I am kind and curious and always hungry for deeper things— you taught my heart to make room, not to settle, to stay wild and brave.

I am still waiting for you to walk in, to say my name one last time. I think it will always be this way. Some conditioning in my brain that waits for the clanging of blinds at the back door. For the soft bellow of your voice. You’re home and all is well. You’re home and nothing else. Now come meet me at the end of the hallway. I have something to tell you.

Sometimes the memories feel like torment. I almost wish you away. But then I have this: You. Everything. I have love and hope and gratitude, too. The way you made me feel. It’s like a whole lifetime of you sits in me, an entire story I’ll never stop writing. I don’t want to.

Thank you, because I can go on out into the world and keep on giving. Because I’m filled to the brim with your memory and this is a story about love and the things it taught me in the river. You have been my summertime and my spring, my fall and my winter. Thank you, my lightning strike, for pulsing right through me, for telling me not to forget, for telling me that there is a dawn arising.

Yes, it’s time to go to bed now, but when we wake,

morning.

—Kaylie R. Brisbourne