Worlds Within: The Walking Distance

It is strange, isn’t it,
that we breathe the same air
and still remain hidden.

We pass each other
like countries without visas,
like windows lit at night
with no way to know
what grief is eating at the table,
what name is still being whispered
inside.

I have loved people
I never truly reached.
Not because I did not try,
but because a person
is more than their smile,
more than the words they let escape,
more than the version of themselves
they can bear to show.

There were rooms in them
I was never allowed to enter.
Old loyalties.
Unburied memories.
A past still speaking
in a language
I could not silence.

And maybe
that is the loneliest truth:
we coexist,
we touch for a moment,
we change each other,
and still
we remain partly invisible.

You can hold someone
and never hold
the whole of them.
You can lose someone
without ever having had
their full world.

So now I think
peace is not being chosen
by every world I visit.
Peace is learning
to return to my own.

To stop building altars
in the ruins of people
who could not keep me.
To stop sending my future
into places
my name was never meant to live.

Let them be distant countries.
Let them close their gates.
I am done asking
to be seen
by those who looked away.

I will make a world here,
with my own hands,
so alive, so inhabited,
that memory becomes
only memory -

not a homeland,
not a sentence,
not a door
I keep standing before.

 -Neharu (ネハル)