HELPLESS

For Ichie Papandu. There are lights that announce themselves. And then there is yours. Singular. Uninterested in spectacle.

Still burning in the middle of things that should have swallowed it whole.

I have lain on my bathroom floor, cold tile pressed into my belly, the kind of crying that has no shape left.

You did not ask me to stand. You did not tell me it would pass. You lay there with me. And you cried too.

That is how I know your light is real. Not because it chased the darkness away, but because it stayed when the dark refused to leave.