What I Could Have Done, But Didn’t
There was a night the world leaned close,
and its breath smelled of iron and rain.
I stood in the kitchen,
the light above me like a question
no one wanted to ask.
The dishes gleamed with their clean silence.
The knife lay down, tired from its work.
Even the clock held its tongue.
I thought of my children—
their eyes like small mirrors,
showing me the face I had once been proud of.
I thought of the body,
how it learns the language of ache,
how it speaks in bruises and sighs.
And I thought—
what if I could make the ache into music?
What if the leaving
was only another word for staying,
spelled differently in the dark?
So I wrote instead,
cut the page open,
and let the words bleed out.
When morning came,
I washed my hands in sunlight.
No one knew
how close I’d come to naming the end.
Only the poem did.
And it kept this the secret.
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