The Threshold I Cannot Name

The Threshold I Cannot Name

I wake and the room is exactly as I left it!
And that is the first thing that frightens me.

She is gone and the walls remain somehow
indifferent, whitewashed,
slightly warmer than they have any right to be.

I run my hand along one another and,
It does not even flinch.

Nothing does, anymore.

Her side of the bed has forgotten her already.
The pillow holds no argument.

I yet press my face into it anyway,
the way a man searches a burned house
for something that was never an object to begin with.

There is a version of me that she loved.
I have looked for him in every corner and mirror,
but I find only his coat,
his handwriting on a note that says nothing urgent,
his particular way of standing at the window
like a man waiting for the sun to set,
which he already knows has passed.

I think I am still reaching for her.
I think the reaching has become my life.

At night, the darkness does not arrive,
It was already here, sitting in her chair,
patient, the way only something permanent can be.

It does not ask questions.
I ask enough for both of us.

Was she leaving before she left?
Was there a moment I could have named and didn’t,
because naming it would have made it real?

I loved her the way I breathe!
Without method, without credit,
and now that she is gone and
I find I am still breathing, and this strikes me
as the cruelest joke I have ever been the subject of.

She took nothing I can point to.
She took everything I cannot explain.

The coffee cup she used is still here.
I cannot bring myself to wash it,
I cannot bring myself to use it,
It sits on the counter like a verdict I am not qualified to appeal.

The yearning has no address now and,
It simply continues, diligent, untethered,
like a dog that still waits by the door
long after her footsteps have stopped being the ones it’s listening for.

Some mornings I believe
I am on the verge of becoming a man who has moved on.

Then the light comes through the window
at exactly the angle it used to when she was standing in it.

Then I am again just a man at the edge
of a feeling he cannot diagram or survive or entirely release.
I do not know which side of this I am on.

I’m not sure she knew either, when she left.
I’m not sure it would have changed anything.
And that! that is the thing I keep returning to,
in the dark, in the quiet,
in the room that is exactly as I left it
that it might not have changed anything at all.

~Black_tale

P.S There is not rage, not resolution, just the horrible openness of a question that has no court to be heard in.