The last dance
"It’s time for my last dance, the last I will ever get offered before the night collects what I owe it."
Please let me have this last dance with you?
After tonight, the world will go quiet,
a single velvet curtain,
and I stand behind it like a lanternfish
glowing with the last of it’s borrowed light.
Not fading, just returning
to whatever deep place it first shimmered from.
The room is crowded with faces
I once arranged like pressed flowers
between chapters of my life,
but they blur now, soft-edged, reverent,
as if they know this is the moment
I must choose a hand to take
before the music stills.
And there you are.
The quiet architect of the weather inside me.
You never walked into my life,
you seeped in,
like warmth traveling through old floorboards,
finding the cracks
I didn’t know were waiting.
The others smile, expecting something tender,
something bright,
but I already feel the tide changing.
It’s time for my last dance,
the last I will ever get offered
before the night collects what I owe it.
I find myself drifting toward you,
the one who never asked to be chosen
and yet built a home for my pulse
without touching a single wall.
It may sound unhinged, a little impossible,
to want to dance with the one
who held my soul the way
a shoreline holds a message in a bottle.
Not prying it open,
just giving it a place to wash ashore.
But the truth is simple.
I don’t know if any other heart
will ever echo mine
with the same, strange fluency.
So when the violin bows set in decrescendo,
like a promise about to break,
I gather what is left of my borrowed glow
and offer it to you.
Not because you were meant for me,
not because destiny scribbled our names together,
but because in a room full of every life
I could have lived,
you are the I would return to.
And if this is my last dance,
let it be with the one
who taught me
that even a soul made of saltwater
can be held gently,
and shine,
even at the end,
as if it is just beginning.