Ode to the Empty Chair

There are mornings
when silence has a heartbeat.

Not loud.
Not dramatic.

Just…
persistent.

The house still hums,
but it hums with absence.
Every ticking clock rehearses a language
I used to know—

your language.

A mother calling without raising her voice.
A father laughing like the day wasn’t trying to break him yet.

Now the kitchen light feels like confession.
The walls listen.
They don’t answer.

The chairs stay loyal—
backs straight,
seats empty—
as if memory itself is waiting for permission
to sit down again.

[.]

I’ve tried to become brave
the way you were.

Not the loud kind of brave.
Not the kind with banners and speeches.

The quiet kind.
The kind that wakes up anyway.

But courage, I’ve learned,
is small.
It trembles.
It hides in old photographs
and smells like your soap,
your tobacco,
the warmth you carried into rooms
without ever announcing yourself.

How do you name an ache
that stays after love leaves time?

Grief isn’t a storm.
It doesn’t warn you.
It doesn’t pass.

Grief is a tide.

It retreats.
It returns.
It rearranges the shore
you were sure belonged to you.

Every day
it brings something back—

a recipe in your handwriting,
a letter half-torn,
a song that suddenly
tastes like laughter
I can’t answer anymore.

Grandpa—

Your voice still lives
in the morning news,
in the scrape of metal,
in the way my hands hesitate
before they learn.

You believed in calloused palms,
in labour that didn’t need applause.

You never taught philosophy.
You built it.

Nail by nail.
Roof by roof.

You made the world feel measurable.
Like if I stood still long enough,
I could understand it.

Mother—

You were a quiet revolution.

Your silence could scold.
Your laughter could heal.
Your prayers stitched the night
back together.

You held the world in place
with ordinary miracles—

boiling rice,
mending shirts,
forgiving us
before we learned how to ask.

Now I walk through your absence
like fog.

Slow.
Careful.

Afraid that if I move too fast
I’ll lose the shape of things.

The world is louder now.
Crowds don’t know how to be still.

What I miss
isn’t the big moments.

It’s the smallness.

The waiting.
The light on your shoulders.
The way our house breathed
in rhythm with your stories.

Sometimes I dream
you’re standing by the sea.

You look younger.
As if death forgot to finish its work.

You don’t speak.
You don’t have to.

Your eyes tell me:
the body is temporary,
love is not.

That I shouldn’t live
to remember you—
but to continue you.

I wake up with salt on my lips.
I never know
if it’s the ocean
or my grief.

Grief is a slow teacher.

It teaches humility—
that the universe does not bend
to longing.

It teaches patience—
that love can still build a home
inside the ribs.

And sometimes…
it teaches beauty.

The fragile kind.
The kind that lives
in one candle flame
and forgives the dark
for being endless.

I don’t ask where you went anymore.

Maybe you’re the rain
softening the soil.
The wind in bamboo.
The bird that pauses
at my window each dawn.

Maybe you’re the quiet
before prayer begins.

I still speak to you.

In unfinished sentences.
In gratitude I don’t know how to say out loud.

If souls are rivers,
then I am still your water.

Moving.
Changing.
Carrying your reflection
even when the surface breaks.

You taught me
love is not possession.

It’s inheritance.

Not the keeping—
the becoming.

So I walk carefully.
I carry your names
like compass and lantern.

And when dusk grows heavy with longing,
I whisper—

I am here.
I remember.

And I am still
your child.