Buried Long Ago

By Peter Bowden


You buried her long ago, on a morning that did not feel like morning. The light came thin and undecided, as if it had lost its way and settled there by accident. The earth was soft from a night of quiet rain, and it gave easily, too easily, as though it understood something you did not. There were words spoken, but they passed over you like wind through open windows, heard, but not held. When it was done, you stood a moment longer than the others, your hands empty, your pockets holding nothing that could help. Then you turned and walked away because that is what the living do.

Time moved, because it always does. It moved through rooms you kept and rooms you closed off, through mornings that asked things of you and nights that asked more. You learned the weight of ordinary hours without her, how a chair could remain a chair and still feel wrong, how a silence could stretch and settle like dust on everything you touched. People said you would carry her with you, and you nodded because it was easier than explaining that carrying is not the same as keeping. Some days she was near as breath, and others she was a distance so wide it felt like something had been taken not just from you, but from the shape of the world itself.

And yet, there are moments, small, unannounced, when she returns, not as she was that last morning, but as she had always been. In the turn of a phrase you almost remember, in the way light leans through a window just before evening gives up its hold, in the quiet certainty of something that refuses to be buried no matter how carefully you tried. You stop when it happens. You stand very still, as if the moment might startle and run. And in that stillness, you understand something the earth could not hold for you: that you did not bury her entirely, not then, not ever. Some things are not meant to stay where we leave them.

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