the world still makes us
a poem about life, death, and the quiet that happens between love and death
tonight the thunder wears perfume and she sits cross legged before a glowing screen, beer sweating onto a desk cluttered with half charged things and unfinished selves. outside, the city keeps pretending it does not hear the sirens. inside, she carries voices like coins sewn into velvet, heavy enough to bend the seams. there are people alive right now only because her voice remained calm while theirs shattered like glass under headlights. there are mothers who still have sons. dogs still waiting at doorways. apartments still warm with breathing. and somewhere else tonight, someone is learning the shape of grief through a telephone speaker. she knows that sound. the pause before the scream. the trainlight moment. the impossible stillness before a life splits open like lightning through wet black sky. people think thunder is the loud part. it isn't. it is the flash. the instant the world becomes photograph. the second where everything is illuminated enough to realize what has already been lost. and love... love is not gentle the way stories promised. love takes hostages. keeps them warm sometimes. feeds them soft words and forehead kisses while quietly locking the exits. some nights the loneliness feels survivable until someone touches her hair correctly. until someone says stay. until someone learns the map of her damage well enough to walk it barefoot. then suddenly freedom tastes cold. so she bargains. alone, or together with those who wound softly. empty bed, or arms that fit wrong. silence, or the beautiful disaster of being known. she sits there tonight, half illuminated by monitor glow, listening to songs arranged like bruises by color, wondering why sunrise keeps arriving for people who did not ask to survive the night. but it comes anyway. slowly. reluctantly. gold bleeding through the blinds like heaven apologizing for something it refuses to explain. and for one impossible second, between the last thunder and the first birdcall, she is not someone people know about, not ghost, not fractured thing stitched together by static and memory. just a girl being held by the soft velvet dark while the world turns carefully beneath her.