Love can overflow

In honour of you, my brother <3

The song we still listen to

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A hush settled over that day
like dust on an unopened window,
the kind that drifts in slow spirals
like when a house tries to remember
how sunlight used to fall.

I stood beside the wooden vessel
that carried the shape of your absence,
it’s surface marked by small, bright prints.
Tiny suns pressed onto night,
as if someone had tried
to lift the darkness with their hands.

He didn’t understand the way the world
can shrink in on itself,
only that you had gone
somewhere skybound,
somewhere he could not follow
except in the trembling notes
of his small, cracked voice.

The echoes of that moment
still cling to me like smoke.
Gauloises blue, you always told me to never pick them up.
I keep returning to the doorway of that room,
to the flutter of a child’s fingers
spreading color on a final canvas,
to the way his tears
made the colors run
like rain sliding down spring glass.

There was a message in it,
though none of us could read it.
A language painted in longing,
in the shape of small palms
reaching for something
that would not reach back.

Your name rarely visits my tongue now,
yet you live in the quiet corners,
right next to the window where we put you.
In the hollow between heartbeats,
in the soft collapse of evening,
in the sudden heaviness
that settles without warning
like a storm deciding where to fall.

I trace the outline of the years
we were supposed to have,
fingertips grazing the edges
of unfinished laughter,
of stories left mid-breath.
They curl around me sometimes,
the way cold air wraps itself
around exposed skin.

What lingers is not the ceremony
or the hymns or the folding chairs,
but the way everything felt
a little too bright,
as if the world had cracked open
and light was leaking out
in places it shouldn’t.
What stays is that small boy’s voice
calling into the unseen,
believing the sky would answer.
What stays is the ache
that moves with it’s own pulse,
slow and unrelenting,
a tide that never fully recedes.

And in the stillness between days,
I feel the pull
of all that can’t be mended,
a thread tugging through memory,
tightening, loosening,
never breaking.

I walk with it,
the unseen weight,
the shadow of a body
I can no longer hold,
the color-stained coffin
that taught me how love
can overflow even
when everything else
has already fallen away.

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