The Doorway of Light

You slipped from this world like a shadow crossing into light, and I stood in the doorway with the hollow ache of having known you well and not long enough.

I reached toward the space you filled, my hands meeting only memory, bright as a distant star, too far to touch, close enough to burn.

How could you be here one moment and gone the next? How could love endure when the body it reached for was no longer there?

In the breaking, I began to hear another voice, not yours returned from beyond, but what your life had planted in me.

You are gone. This is the truth grief keeps teaching. And still, something remains: the warmth I learned beside you, the courage borrowed from your hands, the way I now notice wind in the trees.

I do not know what waits beyond death. Sometimes I imagine you as light, air, or silence speaking without words. I know these are images, and I let them comfort me.

There is separation. There is also connection that death cannot neatly erase: memory, influence, love carried forward by the living.

You are not here as you were. Yet the doorway is not empty. I stand within it, holding what remains, and learning how to step back into life.