sleeping in the same bed as someone who feels like a stranger

The middle of the day is long when the person beside you feels like a stranger. You lie there, hips touching, breathing the same air, yet separated by a silence that feels like a wall.

It is the quiet desperation of routine—the fear that this distance is all there is, that the gap has become permanent. But the light is present even here, in this mundane, aching space between two bodies.

It does not demand you fix it right now. It does not ask you to force a conversation or pretend the distance isn't real.

It simply sits with you in the middle of it, refusing to let the silence define you. 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 light is already running toward the space between you. You are not two strangers stuck in a room.

You are two branches waiting for the sap to rise again.