I watched from where I stood,
Admiring what I could not be,
Finding fragments of myself
In the person I wished to see.
Then slowly, you faded from my sight,
A distant figure swallowed by the night;
Until I questioned your existence
How could you leave without a sound,
Yet leave your presence scattered around?
There is pain within absence,
There is guilt within the mind,
There are questions left unanswered,
And memories we cannot rewind.
With fleeting minds and fleeting hearts,
We reach for what we cannot touch;
We see what lies beyond our sight,
We feel what once meant so much.
As if the body were a puzzle,
Its pieces scattered, stripped and bare,
Until we learn that who we are
Was never ours alone to bear.
We are made of borrowed pieces,
Of words someone once had said,
Of lessons left to guide our steps,
Of kindness quietly spread.
Slowly, we become a mosaic,
Of every person we have known,
Of every soul that shaped our own,
Of every love we call our own.
And maybe this is how you remain
Not as a shadow I must chase,
But in the things you taught me,
In every change you left in place.
You are no longer where I look,
Yet somehow, you are still near;
In every lesson I carry forward,
In every day I persevere.
Perhaps moving forward
Does not mean leaving you behind;
Perhaps it means carrying what you gave
Into this life that still is mine.
Because we are built by care
Of the people we have loved
Pieces formed by hands we held,
And souls we once were touched by.
And even when the soul has left the body,
Even when a presence fades from memory,
Something of them still remains,
A whisper beneath the silence,
A light beneath the shade,
A piece of who they were,
In every piece of us they made.
For what is lost above
May still live below;
What leaves the body
Need not leave the soul.
As above, so below;
As alive, within us, the soul.
Illustrated by Remjan Ashley Claire Pimentel
