The Sun That Kept My Grief in Amber

I have lived in this apartment for three years, and it still smells of someone else's goodbye. The dresser by the window is old — its wood cracked like a dried riverbed, its round knobs worn to a dull moonlight by fingers that are no longer here. I lean my shoulder against it now, wearing only the yellow swimsuit I bought in a fit of stubborn joy last spring, and let the afternoon pour over me like warm honey.
He will come home soon. He always does after the rain. When he opens the door he never speaks first; he only stands in the threshold and watches the light catch my skin, as if memorizing a painting no one commissioned. That silence is not absence — it is the softest language I have ever learned to read.
We lost so much before we found each other: a city that moved too fast, a heart that forgot how to stay. But here, in this sun-bleached room where time has pooled and gone still, my body remembers what my mind had buried — that warmth is not a luxury, but a survival. I close my eyes against the gold hour and feel his breath behind me, slow as tide, and for the first time in years the past stops digging its grave.

Editor: Antique Box