Between Bruises & Blooms

I do not know your name beyond the one you leave beneath my words.

A stranger, standing at the edge of a lantern’s reach.

Yet somehow you keep finding the same old houses.

The ivy.

The widow.

The chapel where moss remembers prayers better than people do.

You walk through them gently, touching the walls without disturbing the ghosts.

You notice the lines I almost deleted.

The endings I worried were too quiet.

The candles left burning for no one in particular.

It is a strange thing, to spend years writing into the dark,

believing the forest is only answering itself—

and then hear another pair of footsteps.

Not loud.

Not demanding.

Only enough to remind me that echoes sometimes belong to another heartbeat.

So wherever you are—

whatever room you read these poems in,

whatever grief or wonder led you here—

thank you.

For seeing what I buried between the metaphors.

For treating my haunted places like they were worth visiting.

Perhaps we will always remain strangers.

A woman who writes.

A woman who lingers long enough to say, “I was here.”

Sometimes,

that is all a poem has ever hoped for.