absent, almost

⭐poetry corner⭐

“Absent, always. It all happened without me.” Samuel Beckett wrote that. For a while, it was true.

Grief flattened me. I went still, small. The world kept moving, and I didn’t.

But driving from Tennessee to Virginia the other morning, the sky broke open — a riot of burgundy and orange fading into blue, then black — almost artificial in its mercy. And I thought, for the thousandth time: I almost missed this.

It all almost happened without me.

But it didn’t.

And that still stops me sometimes.

How the world keeps offering beauty, even when you’ve done nothing to deserve it.

absent, almost
but not quite.

a pulse beneath the wreck.
a flicker through the fog.
the sound of my own breath
after months of forgetting how.

the sky remembers before I do.
the road hums a low forgiveness.
light forces itself on the windshield—
impossible, unearned.

some mornings I still test the air,
but the warmth keeps coming.
the body keeps believing.

I was nearly gone.
but nearly is not gone.

absent, almost.
present, barely.
alive, entirely.

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