The echo of your retreat

I wake inside the echo of your retreat.
My pulse shakes loose against your silence.
Each word you withhold feels bittersweet.
I build my hope inside your distance.

My body remembers before my mind.
The hunger for warmth, the fear of loss.
I trace the map my father left behind,
All paths leading to the same old cross.

I study the ache, name it like science.
“Anxious attachment,” the doctors say.
But naming won’t cleanse this defiance—
The boy in me still pleads you to stay.

You vanish behind your practiced calm.
I chase the ghost of something kind.
Your quiet feels like an open palm,
And I mistake it for the love I can’t find.

I bargain with the wind for one last sign.
A text, a glance, a crack in your wall.
Yet every gesture I claim as mine
Falls like rain in an empty hall.

My logic knows where this road bends.
It loops back to the father’s stare—
The eyes that never warmed, the love that ends,
The lesson that healing is loving with care.

So I turn the lens onto myself.
I become my own experiment and prayer.
I dust the cobwebs off the shelf
Where I left forgiveness, waiting there.

You, too, are tangled in your flight.
We orbit hurt, unwilling to land.
Our tenderness survives the night,
Though we touch through trembling hands.

I will not run from what is raw.
Nor drown this need in endless chase.
Love is not repair—it is what I saw,
When I held my wounds and gave them grace.

So I reach, still, but now within.
My pulse steadies with honest will.
The cycle breaks where I begin—
Forgiving what I cannot heal.