C.E. Phillippi

The summer warmth is a deception; it touches the skin, but it never reaches the hollow place inside me. There is a specific kind of solitude in being forgotten, a silence so profound that even the house seems to have stopped acknowledging my existence. I watch the golden light pool on the floorboards, warm and inviting, yet I am entirely untethered from it. It is as if the season is a vibrant, living thing that simply flows past me, leaving me untouched and unseen in the draft of an open door.

I see the world continue. I see the colors deepen, the shadows retreat, and the pulse of the earth quicken with a life I no longer share. I am a spectator to a parade of days that hold no purpose for me. My loneliness is not just the absence of voices; it is the slow, quiet realization that time is moving forward, and I am the only thing standing perfectly still. I wait for a knock, a footfall, or even a shifting breeze that feels like an invitation, but there is only the humming of the afternoon. It is a vast, echoing distance between the light I see and the cold I still carry within me. Why can’t I move on to where momma went?