Σελήνη

You never arrived the way people arrive,
loud, with luggage, asking where the light is kept.
You arrived the way weather arrives —
already formed somewhere far off,
already carrying the salt of an older sea,
still not finished healing
from a season nobody else remembers.

Ask you who you are and you'll offer
a name, an age, a city, the work —
the easy things, the outside things,
the clear glass at the front of the house.
You knew that wasn't an answer.
You wrote, years ago, that it wasn't.
You kept the real one in a locked note
dated two in the morning,
and today I want to read it back to you.

Let me get this right, because most people don't:
your silence was never coldness.
Leaving the room was never contempt.
It was a door you closed on yourself
because you feel the way other people bleed —
too much, too deep, too fast to stage-manage.
Every sunset overwhelms you.
Every raised voice takes something out of the drawer.

They called that a weakness.
You wrote it down as the reason you're strong,
and you were right, and it took you years,
and that argument is one of the things
I'd like to congratulate you for winning.

There was a version of you at the mirror
who spoke to herself the way a kind stranger would —
coaxing herself through the getting dressed,
the chin lifted, the black wiped from the cheek,
the small daily performance of being fine
that no one was ever meant to catch her rehearsing.

Both voices were yours:
the one going under
and the one reaching in.
That's the whole trick of you.
That's why there's a birthday to celebrate at all.

But the moon. We have to talk about the moon.
It's in nearly everything you saved.
Not decoration — a correspondent.
You wrote it letters.
You asked how many people it had watched
cry, fall, pray, and carry on regardless.
You did the arithmetic of distance:

if I'm under it and he's under it,
then the space between us has a witness.

There's a bird in the old stories
that drinks nothing but moonlight,
that spends a whole life staring upward
and dies of the looking.
You kept that page.
I don't think you kept it as a warning.
I think you kept it because it read like a mirror.

And that poem you wrote — the sun
loving the moon in secret,
arranging the sunrises and the lovely goodbyes,
keeping it quiet so as not to frighten it —
that was never about astronomy.
That was you explaining how you love:
carefully, from three steps back,
holding the light without closing your hand around it.

Tonight it comes up again over wherever you are.
It has been keeping count. It's on your side.

You said you stood between the ocean and the shore
and couldn't choose,
because one was the rush and one was the rest,
and you needed both, and knew that was greedy,
and said so, and forgave yourself last.

That's the shape of you:
auditing your own heart at four in the morning,
writing the findings down,
harder on yourself than anyone would dare to be.

And then the line I keep going back to:

maybe I'm not ready for any of it,
but this time I'll be brave enough
to let the waves take me.

That isn't surrender. Read it again.
That's someone walking into the water on purpose.
That's the bravest sentence in the whole archive,
and you wrote it about yourself.

Nobody who's met you would call you delicate.
You run at the temperature of a struck match.
You argue, you go quiet, you come back.
You're the reason a cold room warms
and occasionally the reason it burns,
and you'd rather be too much
than the plastic version of yourself
that fits neatly into other people's rooms.

A choice to rebel and be ourselves, you wrote.
You've made that choice more than once,
and every year you make it again,
and that is worth more than candles.

Give you an empty hour and you build something.
A canvas the width of the sky.
The universe repainted in the colours you keep inside.
Stars chased down in the quiet part of the night.
You call it imagination. It isn't.
It's metabolism — how you get through a day,
turning it into something with a shape.

Someone once asked why you write.
You never really answered.
You wrote three pages not answering,
which was the answer.

Two time zones. Two separate planets, you said.
Your morning landing on somebody's midnight.
Love conducted in unread messages,
calls ringing out into empty rooms.
And still:

just the thought that you are there.
Just the sense that I am in your dreams.

Still the good morning. Still the I miss you.

Distance never made you love less.
It made you love louder, and that cost you more,
and you paid it, every time, without discussion.

So — not sunshine. Never the easy weather.
Something that opens at night
and asks nothing of the day.

Not a poem somebody wrote about a woman:
a woman who writes the poems.
Who reaches the last line of her own love story
and keeps going anyway.
Who hides more inside one smile
than most people carry in a lifetime.
Who hands you, at four in the morning,
the entire raw truth of it —
and by breakfast says I'm fine.