I was looking for you in the house,
your reflection missing from the mirrors,
perferated light through the blinds.
I found your silence hard to ignore.
The only response to my call
was the creak of the floorboards, low drip from the faucet.
Your name diffused into the stillness of the air.
The garden path still curved the same way,
I walked it out of habit,
past the bench where you would sit
reading in the shade, lost in pages.
Years later, a short walk from our old house,
I was drinking in the park,
the same spot we used to share,
when the pit in my stomach bit again
frantic, nervous, pacing through the house,
the ache of it flooding back, raw as your absence.
If we act like things aren't spiraling out of hand,
does that make it so?
Does the unspoken thought become the unknown truth?
The broached belief when my friend died decades later--
but it never rears it head when it can be reasoned with.
The world ended on a quiet weekend,
not through diagnosis, emergency, collapse.
Although I hate to think memories bend.
The clock still ticked the hours.
If the rapture happened, why was it unrecognizable?
Why was the sky blue? Why did no one else feel it?
Did these things not announce themselves?
When I found you, you smiled and said good morning, like yesterday never left,
and spoke nothing of the end of the world.
Does that mean it never happened?