Waiting Garden
I had kept a small light burning
in the window of a house
I was no longer sure I lived in.
Not because I expected a ship.
Not anymore.
I had learned the geography of empty horizons,
the quiet language of locked gates,
the particular kind of sleep
that comes when you finally stop
listening for footsteps.
I had learned to make a life
out of the things that stayed:
the cup beside the sink,
the books gathering dust,
the flowers that survived
without anyone remembering to water them.
And for a while,
that was enough.
Then, one evening,
a distant light appeared.
And God, how quickly
the house remembered being a home.
I swept the dust from the windowsill.
I gathered the flowers
I had convinced myself were out of season.
I opened drawers
I had long ago stopped searching,
and found little pieces of hope
folded between ordinary things.
I rehearsed the sound of a door opening,
the warmth of a name
returning to the room.
There was a sentence
I had been saving for the shore—
Welcome home,
and where have you been?
I thought I would say it laughing,
as though the years were only weather,
as though absence were a road
one could simply turn back from.
I thought there would be time
to be foolish and tender.
Time to look at a face
and discover that distance
had not made it any less familiar.
I imagined the smallest things:
the pause before a first embrace,
the awkwardness of standing too close,
the sound of two lives
finally occupying the same hour.
I had not asked the sea for forever.
Only one evening
where the horizon would stop
being the only place
I could find what I missed.
But the sea has its own cruel arithmetic.
A vessel can enter the harbor
without ever reaching the dock.
A light can be close enough
to paint the walls gold
and still leave the room cold.
And so I stood there,
dressed for a celebration
whose hour had quietly passed,
holding a gift beneath my arm
like a little piece of spring
that had nowhere to be planted.
I had made something with my hands.
Something I thought
another pair of eyes might understand.
I had chosen what to wear,
imagined where to stand,
and saved a few words
for the space between arrival and embrace.
Now the painting sits with me.
Perhaps that is what happens
to all the things prepared for a moment
that never learns how to arrive:
they become part of the house.
The flowers dry.
The clothes return to the wardrobe.
The light is switched off
one evening at a time.
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And still,
there are nights when I turn toward the door.
Not because I expect it to open.
Not because I have forgotten
how to live inside these walls.
But because the body remembers
what the heart has spent months
trying to make ordinary.
There is a greeting
that has nowhere to go.
Sometimes I whisper it
just to hear what it sounds like
outside the chambers of my chest.
Welcome home.
And then, softer—
Where have you been?
The night does not answer.
It only gathers the words
and carries them somewhere
beyond the reach of morning.
I used to think the saddest thing
was waiting for a ship
that never came.
I know better now.
It is seeing the light arrive,
watching it tremble against your walls,
allowing yourself, for one brief moment,
to believe the long silence is over—
and realizing
you may never know
what the shore looked like to it.
So tonight,
I will leave the window open.
Not for the ship.
Not for the promise of another arrival.
Only because the room has grown too small
for everything I never got to say.
And if the wind should find
that little sentence on its way out,
let it take its time.
Let it travel over sleeping houses,
through unlit streets,
across the black and breathing water.
Let it reach whoever
has ever prepared a place
for someone who never quite arrived.
Who has ever held a moment
so carefully
that even its absence left fingerprints.
Let them hear it, too.
Welcome home.
Where have you been?
-It was a gift…
