I’m sipping coffee,
thinking about
the one‐year anniversary of your attempted suicide—
how it almost took you from me
in three short minutes.
How the blood dried
in the crevasses of your nail beds
and filled the spaces
between the chips in your pink nail polish.
Your blood scattered like galaxies,
staining the floor of your apartment
and etching its map
on the floor of my heart.
I can’t scrub the planets
from the fibers there.
When I stood there,
I felt so small.
I wanted it clean.
I longed for you to come home,
to feel as if your life
and who you are, is a gift to this world
like I believe it is.
But the carpet wouldn’t brighten—
a sick reminder
of what being sick feels like,
not just for you,
but for me too.
In the hospital, I wept in the hallway.
I called Dad.
I lay on the waiting room floor
as you fought for every breath during surgery.
I wrote a poem every day.
When I visited, I sipped my coffee
and tried to make you smile.
I cried all the way home,
screaming in the parking lot of a church
so God could hear me.
It’s been a year,
and your scar still bleeds into me;
I catch the scent of bleach in its wake.
Yet in that lingering sorrow,
I now glimpse a tender dawn—
a quiet promise that even shattered galaxies
can rearrange into new constellations.
In each fragile morning, I find a whisper of healing,
reminding me that our scars are not merely echoes of pain
but the raw cartography of survival,
a map leading us back home.
