A Slow Thaw in Grey Light

The river gives nothing back this morning, only a flat grey mirror where my reflection sits half-submerged, as if I am already dissolving into the city behind me.
I tie the knot at my waist, grey string against grey skin, and feel the cold air bite the bare column of my spine. This is the part I keep: the cut of fabric, the geometry of a body that has learned to hold its breath. Somewhere across the water, glass towers stand in soft focus, indifferent witnesses.
You are not here. That is the whole point now. For months I have been rehearsing your absence until it became a kind of weather, overcast, pressure building, no rain. And yet when my fingers brush the wet sand at my ankles I remember the warmth of your palm pressed to my lower back last winter, the way you said nothing and meant everything.
Healing, I have decided, is not a flame. It is a slow thaw that arrives while you are looking away, that softens the grey into something almost like gold. I turn my face toward the lens, toward the viewer, toward no one in particular. My lips part. The water keeps its silence. And for one clean second I am exactly as much myself as I have ever been.

Editor: Cold Brew