I won’t poison what was holy

The kitchen feels like an empty temple at night.

I don’t turn on the overhead light. I let the small lamp over the stove hold its circle of gold, like a vigil. The rest stays in shadow—respectful, unnamed. The refrigerator hums. The clock keeps its thin, indifferent oath. The window is a dark mirror.

This room remembers.

Not in thoughts, but in its bones. In the way a chair sits half turned, as if she’ll pass behind it. In the counter space that still feels occupied. In the hush that holds the outline of laughter like how an empty tumbler remembers bourbon.

I can hear our song without playing it.

Not music, exactly. A ghost rhythm. The old summons. The moment my arms used to find her before my mind could catch up—like something ancient in me recognized home and pulled it close.

We danced here.

Not for show. Not for story. For the simple sacrament of being held and holding back. Her weight in my hands—truth, not burden. Her head where it always went. The air thick with that strange gravity love has when it’s real.

Now there is silence.

Not peace. Silence. It fills the space. It echoes. It presses its thumb into the raw place of memory until the body admits what it loved.

I don’t sit with this ache as punishment. I sit with it as fidelity.

Because what was—was. Because I won’t poison the beauty to make the ending easier to carry. I won’t call the warmth of the fire a mistake just because it burned me.

So I stand here in the dim little temple of ordinary things and let the song haunt the air it once blessed. I let the missing be holy without making it a prayer for return. I don’t reach. It isn’t restraint so much as rite. It is a vow, the whisper of a truth—love can be real, and gone, and still worth holding.

This moment’s pain doesn’t erase those moments’ joy; it only proves they were real.