[HOLD] To Your Melancholy

Home… I don’t know why I thought it would feel like one... 

 The air still smells like turpentine and dust but it’s colder now.

She said she’d be there. Just five minutes, she said. Five minutes felt like forever when I was little so I waited and waited. 

But she never came in any of the minutes. The years rolled on, and so did the empty promises, I waited, learned to wait, until waiting became all I knew. I waited for a mother who was never really there, her heart somewhere else lost in the haze and eyes I could never enter,  her love so distant I could not reach no matter how far I stretch these little hands.

It was her silence, her absence, the cold she carried inside her that I felt as my own, a sorrow that started long before my first breath... To your melancholy, I dedicate this waiting, this quiet grief that stretches back before my time, and maybe, in these empty rooms, this house I called home but never lived, we’re both just waiting—for a time and a love that never came.