Muhereza Rodgers Roger Poet Free verse

The Tension of the Almost

Between breath and becoming,
we paused—
not broken,
not whole,
but held in the fragile architecture of almost.

Your shadow leaned into mine
like a confession afraid of its own voice,
and time—
time did not move forward,
it hovered,
like ink refusing to dry on a trembling page.

I remember the nearness of you,
how silence carried more weight than speech,
how the space between our lips
felt wider than oceans,
yet softer than surrender.

We were not strangers,
no—
we were something far more dangerous:
familiar souls
hesitating at the threshold of forever.

The paper beneath us had already begun to tear,
edges frayed by moments we did not choose,
stained by mornings that came too quickly
and nights that lingered too long.
Even then,
love insisted on sketching us in blue—
gentle, aching, unfinished.

There were words we never spoke,
but they lived anyway—
in the tilt of your head,
in the quiet plea of your hands,
in the way my heart learned
to reach without touching.

And oh—
how close we came.

Close enough to taste eternity
on the edge of a second,
close enough to believe
that if the world exhaled differently,
we would fall into each other
without fear,
without fracture,
without the weight of what could be lost.

But almost is a careful artist.
It does not rush its work.
It lingers,
it stretches the moment
until it becomes memory
before it ever becomes reality.

So here we remain—
pressed into the quiet ruin of a beautiful hesitation,
preserved in the language of what never fully happened,
yet never truly ended.

And if anyone should ask what we were,
do not call it absence,
do not call it failure—

call it this:

a love so real
it trembled
at the edge of becoming,
and chose,
for reasons only heaven remembers,
to live forever
in the tension of the almost.

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