Traveler in a Suitcase!

When the Sakura touched the earth,

everyone paused.

As if beauty could buy us a moment

long enough to belong.

You walk beside me.

No footsteps.

No sound.

But I see your shape

in every choice I make.

Even when I run...

especially when I run,

you match my pace

like you’ve always known

where I’ll land.

I closed my eyes once,

and imagined the crows.

How they wait.

How they hunger.

But when I opened them,

you were still there.

Quiet.

Patient.

The most familiar view I’ve ever known.

They say fog eventually lifts.

That clarity returns.

But even when I can’t see you,

I know.

You don’t leave.

You don’t have to.

You live here now.

As long as this curse lingers,

let me feel your hand.

Even if it burns.

Even if it breaks me.

Let me know I’m still something

you reach for.

Even if no one else does.

-Ikkel Yoo-

You handed me a world.

It had windows that wouldn’t open,

light that behaved.

I learned the weather by observation,

not faith.

No guarantees. No clauses.

I struck the match.

I know that

The house brightened once,

then remembered it was ash.

Since then my mind keeps searching for you

the way a lighthouse wastes itself,

methodical, exact,

while you chase rainbows that promise

continuations, not returns.

You will not come back

unless I set a fire in your backyard,

and even then the heat would be

recognition, not mercy.

I wish you happiness.

You blew me off like dust from a book

you’d already decided not to read.

When joy fits you again,

you’ll see me, briefly,

in a red dress, correctly lit.

Not an apology. A proof.

My mind keeps its midnight.

Yours has been laundered, starched,

put away on the correct shelf.

If you looked back,

you’d learn how dark “home” can be

when the lights behave too well.

Maybe you were cursed.

Curses are simply contracts with fancy fonts.

They lapse. They always do.

The spell breaks, I suspect,

the moment I watch you suffer

and do not intervene.

Again: I wish you happiness.

Again: you brushed me off.

Again: when you are finally happy,

you’ll find me.

polite, exact,

in that red dress,

not waiting, only finished.

I remember the song you gave me.

Once it opened a door.

We stepped through, and the room knew our names.

Now it is only a song,

stripped of its key.

Mother kept leaving her son.

Not cruelly, just with that polite kind of sorrow

that teaches you how to disappear

without asking to be found.

I remember the bright days like evidence in a glass case.

Borrowed light, museum air, the label reading: do not touch.

Maybe it was a dream. 

Maybe i made it tidy enough to pass inspection.

It doesn’t look real now. 

It looks framed.

Past keeps its hands on my ankles.

One step forward, it tugs like I owe it breath.

I look over my shoulder and the air bruises.

I don’t cry. If I leak, I flood. If I flood, I disappear.