When the light forgets me
I am my own hearth
May this song keep my heart warm during winter
Some days the light forgets
how to touch me.
It lingers just beyond my reach,
a shy guest
breathing frost across the windows
and leaving me to decipher it’s quiet mood.
The air carries it’s own sort of hush.
The weighted kind,
the kind that settles beneath my ribcage
like an animal curling in for a sleep
too long,
too deep.
It’s strange, loving the chill
even as it unthreads my spark
one silver filament at a time.
Strange to feel devotion
for the season that holds me close
and yet presses it’s cool forehead
against my joy.
But beneath all this muted blue
there is tenderness.
A small kiss, steady,
cupping it’s palms around my tired heart.
It murmurs that this quiet ache
is not a sentence,
only a tide
that will one day draw back into itself.
And in the distance
a warmth I carry
like a secret constellation.
His voice reaches me
like a lantern carried across vast water,
soft but unwavering,
a glow that knows exactly where I stand
even when I lose track of myself.
He touches me without touching,
wraps me in the kind of calm
that turns the frost inside my chest
into something gentler,
something willing to go on.
There are nights when he feels carved
from the same moonlit hush that holds me,
and yet he bends it’s coldness,
coaxes it into something kind.
I think of his hands,
his patience,
his quiet devotion stretched over distance
like a bridge built from warm breath and hope.
And suddenly, the long road between us
feels less like absence
and more like promise.
So I fold myself gently
into the quiet.
I let my steps soften.
I let my pulse loosen its grip.
I wrap my thoughts in warmth,
the way he would.
Slow, intentional,
as though handling something fragile
and beloved.
Because I am that,
and I am also
the persistent bloom
that pushes through frost
year after year.
There will be mornings
when my breath is lighter,
when the hush becomes a song,
when the shy light finally touches my skin
and remembers my name.
And perhaps,
when distance finally shortens,
I’ll step into his arms
and feel the long season exhale.
Until then,
I am my own hearth.
I feed my own.
I let his distant glow
steady my hands.
I stay.
Even the longest cold
cannot withstand a heart
that keeps choosing
to kindle itself,
and the love that keeps choosing me
from afar.