The Marrow-Deep Way Dreams Sometimes Hand You Truth, 2026

I held the flowers like a question I didn’t yet know how to ask,

blue sky breathing around the stems like evening around my windshield,

the sudden impossible yellows and reds of them

alive in the middle of ordinary air,

and I thought,

how strange the rituals of petals are.

for the living.

for the apologizing.

for the newly in love.

for the quietly leaving.

the same fragile burst of color carried through doorways,

into hospitals,

into kitchens,

into rooms where someone is already gone.

and I dreamed,

that ancient telegram from the marrow

where the body writes truths the mind avoids.

I dreamed I was dying,

and the only grief that arrived

was not the dark,

not the silence,

not the unending sleep,

but the terrible unfinished arithmetic of time.

all the mornings I would not drink beside,

all the evenings I would not hear a voice,

wander through the rooms,

all the years that had not yet learned our names,

and waking I remembered the flowers again,

saw how their brightness refused explanation.

how from far away they were only color,

a confusion of warmth,

a field of accidental sun.

but leaning close,

close enough to breathe them,

the shape of them appeared through touch, through scent,

through a vessel of emotional weight.

as if love itself requires the body to move forward,

requires the face to enter the fragile center of the gift,

requires the small courage of believing,

that what is beautiful,

may also be temporary.

and that this

marrow-deep knowing,

is the strange mercy dreams sometimes deliver

in the quiet hours.

placing truth in my hands

the way I, someone,

once placed flowers in yours.