At the Edge of Summer

The streets shimmer in the heat.
Suitcases rumble across railway platforms,
and people disappear
towards the sea.

Her friends leave.

With children on their shoulders,
with sun cream on their hands,
with someone
whose toothbrush lies beside their own.

Three weeks.
Four weeks.
Five weeks.
See you soon.

They disappear
into their summers.

And then comes the silence.

That old, bottomless silence
where even the wind
has forgotten its name.

With summer, something deep within her
swings open
an old trapdoor.

And she falls.

Past the years.
Past the woman she has become.
Down to the little girls within her,
the ones who live beneath the years,
there,
where time left them behind.

They still have the same eyes.

They stand in a doorway, watching
as a mother becomes
first a back,
then a dot,
then the nothingness
that vanishes around a bend.

Three weeks.
Four weeks.
Six weeks.

A childhood long.

In a moment she will be back at her grandfather’s house.

No one hears the sound
of a little girl learning
that calling out changes nothing.

No one is coming.

No one.

The pain falls into her
and keeps sinking,
like a stone
that never finds the bottom.

It pulls at her.
Back.
Again and again, back.

Every summer. And in between.
The old wounds open their door to her
as though she had never left.

Each year the woman finds herself there again.
She hears the voices of the little girls within her,
still sitting before empty plates,
still taking every footstep in the hallway
for love.

But this time
she does not run after it.

This time
she sits down beside them,
among the empty plates.

And from the depths, the girls begin to speak:
Come back.
Please. Come back.
Don’t leave me alone.

While abandonment moves
through the rooms of her ribs
like winter wind through an empty house,
she tries to stay.

The girls within her
no longer need someone
to silence them.

They need someone
who will hear their names
and stay.

So the woman gathers her courage
the way other people gather shells on a beach.

And then she carries that courage
into herself,
and gently
towards her friends.

With trembling hands
she lays it between them.

Grandfather.
Summer.
The girls within her,
still holding their breath
whenever farewell enters the room.

And the woman realises
that she does too.

The words stumble into dawn.

The little girls inside the house
step quietly into view.

Not healed.
Yet no longer hidden.

They wait.
One heartbeat.
Then another.
But this time,
no one leaves.

And deep beneath the old trapdoor,
somewhere between June and August,
the girls finally stop
watching the nothingness beyond the bend.

When evening comes,
they sit beside the woman
on the roof of her heart.

And no one is missing.

Together they watch
as the summer evening
pours gold across the rooftops.

For the first time,
abandonment
is no longer sitting alone
in the dark.

Imprint

At the Edge of Summer

contact: info@not-alone.space