The In-Between
Moving day unfolds the silence
from boxes I forgot I packed,
letting the noise I taped away escape.
Grief rides shotgun
while hope waits on the curb,
checking its phone,
not sure if it's been ghosted again.
I’ve been delaying this flood,
but the current catches me—
a sister gone,
two homes emptied of laughter and love,
a coast swapped like a coat
I’m not sure still fits.
Thirty-one feels like
rebooting a life
with a password I’ve forgotten.
All those blueprints—
six years of “we”
replaced overnight
by a “me” I haven’t met in years.
There was an ending.
Then a beginning.
Then another kind of ending
that still pulses
like phantom pain.
Movies lie.
Books lie too.
They gift us closure
like it’s a line break
and not a thousand pages
of overlap and confusion.
Beginnings don’t wait their turn.
Endings don’t know when to leave.
I envy the characters
who never hesitate,
who always know what to say
because someone wrote it that way.
I want that kind of god—
the kind who hands me a script
instead of a pen
and a blinking cursor
on a blank, terrifying page.
But we improvise here.
We free-fall with grace,
if we’re lucky.
How can I feel both balanced and breaking?
How can I rebuild
when I still taste the ashes
of everything that crumbled?
I say “one day at a time”
like a prayer I’m learning
in a language I barely believe in.
Because what else is there?
The past year dismantled me.
Left me with nothing but time
and the relentless now.
But maybe
that’s not nothing.
So if you’ve found the answer,
write it down.
Etch it into stone.
Tattoo it on the sky.
Until then,
I’ll wear this ache
and this hope together
like mismatched shoes
and keep walking anyway.