Absence

Some people leave loudly.
A moment that splits life clean in two,
before and after
clearly marked.

But you left differently.

You remain
in the quiet habits of people who loved you.
In songs that arrive unexpectedly.
In certain roads,
certain sunsets,
certain stupid little jokes
that still feel incomplete without you hearing them.

Grief is strange like that.

It does not live permanently in tears.
Sometimes it lives in laughter
followed immediately
by silence.

In reaching for a phone
before remembering.
In wanting to tell you something
for half a second
before reality catches up again.

And the hardest thing is this,
the world kept moving.

Morning still came.
Football still got played.
People still filled pubs
and talked about ordinary things.

While somewhere inside us
time sat down beside your name
and refused to go any further.

But love has its own stubbornness.

So we carry you forward now,
not perfectly,
not gracefully,
but honestly.

In stories.
In songs.
In broken conversations.
In the ache that proves
you mattered enough
to leave part of yourself behind
in all of us.