When There Was Still Time

There are certain years

I keep returning to.

Not because they belong to me.

But because they seem to contain

the last version of you

I believed I could still reach.

Before disappointment

became a permanent resident.

Before survival

became your first language.

Before the future narrowed

into the one

you eventually inherited.

We were children then.

Two small lives

growing beneath the same weather.

Learning too early

how much a heart can carry.

And somewhere inside those years,

we made a promise.

The kind spoken

with the certainty

only children possess.

Whatever happens,

I'll find you.

Whatever happens,

you won't face it alone.

I believed those words.

Carried them far beyond

the years that created them.

Carried them through distance.

Through adulthood.

Through every season

that pulled our lives

farther apart.

Still,

I find myself returning.

To the overlooked afternoons.

The unfinished conversations.

The ordinary moments

that concealed their importance

until it was too late.

I imagine finding you there.

At the bend.

At the turning.

At the quiet division

between one life

and another.

I wonder

if there was something

I failed to see.

A sorrow

still small enough

to be spoken aloud.

A loneliness

still willing

to be interrupted.

A door

still standing open.

Maybe I would have said

the thing you needed to hear.

Maybe I would have stayed

a little longer.

Maybe I would have recognized

what was happening

before it became

the shape of your life.

For years,

I thought my regret

was not doing enough.

Not calling more.

Not reaching farther.

Not standing between you

and everything that followed.

But regret has a way

of changing shape.

And what I understand now

is something harder.

By the time I knew

you were lost,

you had already been leaving

for years.

The turning

I keep searching for

was never a single moment.

It was a hundred small sorrows

gathering quietly

in the same direction.

A disappointment

that never healed.

A wound

that found deeper roots.

A hope

slowly learning

how to expect less.

And by the time

I recognized the pattern,

I was already standing

on the far side of it.

Looking back.

Wishing I had arrived

when there was still

something left to change.