Still Here

Let the silence lengthen if it must. A season. A winter of years. The phone may sleep, face to the wood, and still the love keeps its post like a lantern left burning in a house we do not visit, but have not sold.

We were young, and the world was a stage with too few seats. Naive as morning, we spent our voices on the stupidest sentences, bright and breakable, because a laugh was a country we could enter together. We chose the foolish road on purpose, not lost, but hungry to be seen, to be chosen, to stand inside the story instead of shading its edge.

I do not need a fresh hour of talk to find you. You are already built into me: those radiant, reckless afternoons, the ones we would not trade and would not perform before anyone grown and sensible.

Should we meet, the old laughter will know our names before we do. Should we not speak for a long while, the bond does not thin. It waits, as a name waits on a tongue that has gone quiet, still warm, still certain. Yours. Mine. Unretired. Still here.