The clock didn’t hesitate,
didn’t stutter,
didn’t even glance over its shoulder
to see what it had just passed.
Five minutes ago
the world made sense in the way it always does
fragile, sure,
but still pretending at order.
Five minutes later
he was gone
and everything insists
on continuing.
Cars move.
People laugh somewhere.
A door closes down the street
like nothing sacred has been broken.
And I am supposed to be
the same person.
The same voice,
the same face,
the same steady hands
that now know something
they didn’t before.
I watched him grow up.
That phrase feels too small;
like trying to hold a storm
in a paper cup.
I remember him as a kid,
running, loud, unfinished;
the way all children are
before the world starts carving at them.
He and my daughter.
same age,
same orbit,
crossing paths in the bright, careless way
kids do
when the future feels like a guarantee.
We thought...
didn’t we all think?
that we could make it better.
That if we just tried hard enough,
loved hard enough,
paid attention,
we could build something safer
for them to grow into.
But what does that belief weigh now?
What does it matter
against something like this?
Twenty-one.
Old enough, they say.
An adult.
But that word doesn’t fit
when I picture him.
Twenty-one is still half-written.
Still becoming.
Still soft in places
no one admits are soft.
Still someone’s kid.
Still someone you expect
to see again.
And now?
Nothing has stopped.
That might be the worst of it.
Not just that he’s gone,
but that the world
doesn’t know how to hold that truth
with the gravity it deserves.
So it hands it to us instead.
Says:
carry this quietly.
Carry this while you work,
while you talk,
while you pretend
you are unchanged.
But I am not unchanged.
There is a crack now;
wide, loud, impossible to ignore,
running through everything I thought
would be enough to keep them safe.
And I don’t know
where to put that.
I don’t know
what to do
with a world
that keeps moving
as if it hasn’t just lost
one of its own.
