What if your first goodbye came before you knew
What separation meant, or what love could do?
What if the people you needed were there,
Yet somehow unreachable, lost in thin air?
Perhaps you learned distance before you learned trust,
Discovered too early that closeness could rust.
Perhaps someone was missing, a presence withdrawn,
And you carried that absence from dusk until dawn.
You watched other families gather and glow,
Wondering what they possessed that you couldn’t know’.
Was there something you lacked, some invisible flaw’?
Some reason affection obeyed a different law?
The Sun wanted recognition, a place in the light,
Saturn built walls in the middle of night.
One cried, “Will somebody please notice I’m here?”
The other said, “Hide it. Don’t show them your fear.”
But tell me, what happens when distance feels safe?
When you long to be held, yet retreat from embrace?
When someone comes closer, your heart starts to race,
And solitude feels like a familiar place?
Is it peace that you seek when you choose to withdraw,
Or protection from losing what you never quite saw?
Do you leave before others can leave you behind,
Keeping love at a distance to quiet your mind?
Perhaps you’ve grown tired of this invisible ache,
Of waking each morning with connections to make.
Of wondering whether you’ll ever belong,
Of pretending that solitude makes you strong.
And yet, dear soul, look how far you have come’!
You survived every silence, every emotional numb’.
You built a whole world from the pieces you knew,
And kept searching for something honest and true.
But survival is not the same thing as living,
And isolation is not the same thing as healing.
You can need someone without losing your ground,
You can let yourself love without fearing the sound
You cannot recover each moment you missed,
But you can build new memories, beginning with this:
You are allowed to belong. You are allowed to stay.
You are allowed to be loved without earning your place.
Perhaps reconciliation begins deep within,
When you stop blaming yourself for the distance you’ve lived in.
You need not deny those who left you alone,
But you need not spend forever feeling homeless in your own soul.
So tell me, dear soul, when you think of your past,
Did distance arrive before closeness could last?
And can you imagine, despite all you’ve known,
That the heart that felt homeless can one day feel home?
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