STILL TENDER STILL LEARNING ALREADY MENDING

Mornings arrive lighter but not weightless—
a stillness less easy than joy,
yet not as heavy as heartbreak.
I move through rooms like someone learning a house’s language,
closing doors with the patient caution
of one who has memorized the weight of silence.

Photographs come down in slow hands;
frames stack on the floor like unfinished thoughts.
Nothing fills their spaces yet.
The walls keep their hollows,
as if they need time to remember how to breathe again.

I eat alone now in the quiet;
the table set for one, your absence laid bare.
I notice the way sunlight touches the polished wood
where your hand once rested—
just one of the many things
I failed to notice before.

Some afternoons the streets feel thin and generous;
I drive and forget your shape for hours.
Errands become practice,
habits become solitude—
a door locked without listening
for the footsteps I still half expect,
a book closed and put away
without sending the passage I saved for you.

I make the bed each morning like rehearsing a gesture until it no longer surprises me.
Pull up floorboards, lay new ones
until the room sounds right.
Fill the holes in the wall, sand them smooth,
paint until the scar softens into the room’s skin.
Move furniture like a quiet argument,
seeking new corners willing to hold the light.

These are small violences
and small mercies—
the house learning a different shape,
filling the quiet spaces you left behind.

Some days tenderness arrives like theft:
a laugh suddenly mine,
a kindness I did not plan to give.
Some days the ache is only a rumor
I almost no longer believe.

But night comes with its exacting cold.
The old ache returns without warning—
quiet, steady—
settling beside me first,
then making its bedding deep in my chest,
reminding me of the parts I haven’t fixed,
the spaces I haven’t filled.

Healing is not a line
but a geography—
plateaus, ravines,
roads circling back on themselves.

Months teach patience
and the odd mercy of forgetting;
they teach you how to hold a lit coal in your palm
without burning everything else.

I am learning the contours of myself without you—
shades of paint, quiet fields,
small stubborn towns.

Between lighter days and colder nights
I practice being present to myself—
untangling small knots,
folding them into a life
not yet whole
but learning to stand.

Perhaps one day learning will become practice,
and practice habit,
and habit a life
the cold can no longer enter.

Perhaps.
Only time will tell.

Until then, each day reveals its secret—
lighter than the one before,
yet heavier than the one that follows.

And so I remain—
still tender, still learning, already mending—
waiting to see how much less of you tomorrow will bring,
leaving small parts of us
in the grave where we buried our love,
and taking only myself in return.