the bear

i keep wondering if that’s why you left.

in the dark, in the hours that stretch long and thin between midnight and morning, i lie awake and turn it over like a smooth stone. there are nights when i tell myself the answer is near, just beneath the surface of memory, waiting to be named. i imagine the moment it all split, the before and after of it, the soft rupture that never quite healed. i imagine your footsteps leaving, soft as breath, final as thunder.

i tell myself it wasn’t about me. you left to save yourself. i believe that, or i try to. i say it again and again, until the syllables lose shape. but what lingers is something quieter, something heavier, like you handed me a bag of stones and asked me to carry them for you, and i’ve been doing it ever since.

there are people we no longer speak of, and that silence says more than any story ever could. i’ve stopped trying to understand them. maybe denial was a shield. maybe it helped them sleep. there are gestures i remember, phrases that hovered in doorways, faces that stiffened just slightly when truth approached. maybe they thought avoidance was kindness. maybe they told themselves we’d forget. but silence has a weight. it calcifies. it closes over what needed to be named. and now when i recall them, something folds in on itself. not quite grief. not quite rage. something rawer.

i think we learned early how to vanish. how to read a room like it might turn on us. how to sit with our backs against walls and eyes always open. we were children, but we were trained. not in words, but in glances. in the hush that fell at the wrong time. in the names that were never spoken twice.

i don’t think love was absent. i think it was misshapen. too tangled to be of use. passed down in forms we couldn’t decipher. it came with its own injuries. and by the time we were old enough to ask what it meant, it had already rewritten us.

you left. and i do not blame you.

i say it again, because it matters. because maybe no one said it to you when you needed to hear it most. i know you left because staying would have hollowed you out. i know that now. and i know you were just as scared as i was. we were children, navigating silence, believing no one would come.

i miss you.

i miss the version of us that could have existed in a different house. a different kind of quiet. not the silence of survival, but the kind that comes with peace. i imagine it sometimes. a life where we were allowed to be whole. where we didn’t have to become so careful.

on certain nights i pretend you’re reading this. sitting somewhere soft. in front of a window. in a warm kitchen. maybe lying in bed with the lamp still on. i hope he is good to you. i hope they don’t ask for explanations. i hope they don’t need you to translate the weight you carry. i hope they let you be.

and if you ever do read this, know that i understand more now than i used to. and i love you. i love you even with the distance, even with the silence, even with the years. you are still the one who braided my hair in the hallway, who once burned my ear with the iron and cried harder than i did. still the one who knew when i was lying. still the one who would understand the things i never say.

i am here. i haven’t moved.

i’m still trying. still listening for the break in the quiet. still waiting for the light to shift. wondering if one day we will sit across from each other and not flinch. wondering if we will ever speak it aloud.

until then, i’ll be here. writing into the hush. hoping our silence isn’t forever.