My Life In Word

Disconnected

I sleep beside you
and still feel miles of winter
spread between our bodies,
a cold field beneath the sheets
where nothing grows anymore.

Your back is turned to me
like a locked door,
like a house after fire,
still standing,
but emptied of warmth.

I listen to your breathing
in the dark—
steady, distant, unfamiliar—
and wonder when the sound
of the person I loved
became the sound
of a stranger in the next room.

The mattress remembers us
better than we do.
It still dips in the places
where laughter used to fall,
where our hands once found each other
without searching,
where love once moved
like morning light
across the floor.

Now the air between us
tastes like old rain
and words left too long
on the tongue.
The silence has weight.
It presses against my chest
like a stone I swallowed
and forgot how to name.

I make coffee for two
out of habit,
watch the steam rise
like a ghost from the cup,
and smell the bitterness
before I take a sip.
Even the kitchen knows.
The spoons rest cold in the drawer.
The chairs sit across from each other
like witnesses
too tired to testify.

You ask me if I need anything,
and I almost laugh
because how do I say
I need the warmth back?
I need the version of us
that reached across the car console,
that kissed in grocery store aisles,
that turned ordinary rooms
into shelter.

Instead, I say,
“No, I’m fine,”
and the lie lands softly
between us,
another brick
in the wall we keep building
with polite voices
and careful hands.

At night, I become a shoreline
waiting for a tide
that no longer comes.
I keep listening
for some small return—
your hand brushing mine,
your voice breaking open,
my name spoken
like it still means home.

But we move around each other
like ghosts wearing wedding rings,
haunting the same rooms,
touching the same doorknobs,
eating from the same plates,
while love sits untouched
in the center of the table,
cooling.

I do not know
which is lonelier—
to be alone,
or to be loved badly
by someone close enough
to hear me crying
and still not turn toward me.

So I lie awake
beside the body
that once felt like refuge,
and I understand
how a marriage can become
an abandoned church:
the vows still echo,
the windows still shine,
but no one kneels there anymore.

Simona A. Brinson


Photo by Pier Monzon on Unsplash 

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