In Love Or Just Homesick?

I’ve rushed past more faces in my life

than years I will ever live;

blurred silhouettes I forget on purpose,

because remembering demands a reason.

Faces you like, bones you don’t.

Faces you know, lives you’d never survive.

Yet in that endless procession of utter strangers and familiar acquaintances,

a few faces stay,

the ones that turn themselves

into whole dictionaries of meaning.

One such word is home.

A word tossed around casually

by people who’ve never lost it,

never buried pieces of themselves

just to keep the peace inside four walls.

It cuts deeper for those of us

who grew up in crumbling households inside concrete houses,

where existence was measured in the weight of your wins

and questioned in the gravity of your failures.

In such houses,

home isn’t a destination;

it’s an escape route.

And I taught myself early

that survival begins

the moment you walk out of it.

I would’ve lived just fine

believing that,

if life hadn’t interfered

with inconvenient accuracy.

The first time I saw her was in a photograph —

a smile stretched too far for memory,

a singular dent on her right cheek, 

as if a crack in the flesh

to sink her frowns in

eyebrows drawn wide, outlined neat

over eyes that looked

as if they had innumerable questions

for every certainty in the world.

A nose jutting out like quiet defiance,

hovering above freckles

mapped like a constellation

only she knew how to read.

Lips thin enough to free a lie,

thick enough to hide a truth.

Years have passed since,

and years will pass after,

and that face will return to me

with the precision of a recurring season.

I could exhaust language

trying to describe it, 

stack metaphors until they collapse

under their own exaggeration, 

but some things refuse

the limits of vocabulary.

Some faces don’t become poetry.

They unsettle it.

They make the words step aside

and stand there,

suddenly aware of their own limits.

I wish I could hold her in language

without folding her into rhyme and ritual.

But then, 

do you ever really get to describing a home?

Some places you don’t define;

you grow around,

the way flesh grows around a wound.