When No Record Was Being Kept

You arrived without luggage. The room was bright or dim; someone lifted you into weather. Air entered like a question you have been answering ever since.

First came hunger, then the astonishment of another face. A hand meant warmth, or distance, or wait. You cried in the one language no one owns.

Later they gave you a name— a sound small enough to fit in one mouth— then showed you the borders: this body, this house, our people, theirs.

But rain crossed all of them. Pain required no translation. Everywhere, a cup has gone cold beside the place of someone who had gone.

You have broken what you meant to hold and held what you could not keep. You have mistaken fear for truth, and truth, sometimes, for an enemy.

And somewhere, you have been kind when no record was being kept: you carried a weight that was not yours, or stayed when leaving would have been easier.

Let that be written nowhere. Let it be written in the body it relieved, in the hour made possible, in the earth that was not asked to remember.

No life is lived at a distance. Every act arrives somewhere: a door gives, a face changes, the world grows harder or easier to live in.

One day your name will loosen from you. The room will be bright or dim. Air will go out carrying no answer. The question will pass to the living.