You Are the Ground They Stand On

The house has gone quiet, but not the kind that brings peace. It is the quiet of people learning how to breathe without you.

You watch them move around your absence, adapting to a space you still occupy, and the terror is not that they will forget you—but that they are already surviving you. In this deepest hour, the pain feels like a slow erasure.

Yet the light does not vanish because the room has grown dim. There is a father who saw his son coming home from a long way off.

He ran. Before the apology, before the speech—he ran.

The love in that house has not learned to live without you because it cannot. The light that lives in you is the same light that lives in them.

It was there before the silence, and it will be there after. You are not being erased.

You are the very ground they are standing on.