Where Hours Go
A poem
There are hours
the world never manages to keep.
They slip beneath doors,
between the noise of passing things,
into places no one thinks to search.
I have known such hours.
They were never beautiful
in the way beautiful things
are usually described.
No ceremony.
No witnesses.
Nothing worth remembering
until years later
when the smallest details
begin returning uninvited—
a particular kind of silence,
a laugh breaking where it shouldn’t,
the warmth left behind
on a place that had only just been occupied.
Strange, isn’t it,
how the unremarkable
can become sacred
once it is no longer yours?
There were moments
that asked nothing of the world.
They did not need names.
They existed briefly
and without permission,
untouched by the eyes
that turn everything into a story.
Outside,
life continued making its demands.
Inside,
time seemed to misplace us.
And perhaps that was the beauty of
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it—
not that anything extraordinary happened,
but that nothing had to.
For once,
nothing was being watched.
Nothing was being measured.
Nothing needed to become
anything more than itself.
I sometimes wonder
where those hours went.
Whether they dissolved
the way evening does,
quietly enough
that you only notice
the darkness after it has arrived.
Or whether they are still somewhere,
waiting in the architecture
of an ordinary afternoon—
behind a half-open door,
inside the pause between sentences,
beneath the familiar weight
of a memory refusing to die.
I do not go looking for them.
That would make them smaller.
Instead, I let them come.
And sometimes they do.
Without warning.
A certain light.
A certain hour.
A laugh that isn’t the same
but makes something in me
turn its head.
Then, for a moment,
I am standing somewhere
I cannot return to,
watching the world
through a window
that no longer opens.
It isn’t sorrow.
Not exactly.
Sorrow wants an ending.
This is quieter.
A weight without a wound.
A room inside me
that has remained furnished
despite having no one in it.
And perhaps that is what unsettles me most—
not that something ended,
but that something so small
could have left behind
such an enormous silence.
I wonder
if the world will ever become quiet
in quite the same way again.
Not because I am waiting.
I am not.
But there are certain kinds of quiet
the heart learns once
and spends the rest of its life
recognizing.
And tonight,
I think I can hear one
moving through the walls.
Just faintly.
Just enough
to make me stay awake.
-🩶
