Crossing

Evening leans quietly over the earth.
The day withdraws its brightness
as a hand closes a book.

Something in me grows still.

I do not resist this stillness.
For years it has followed me
like a distant tide
whose sound I heard only in sleep.

Now it is near.

The air itself seems wider,
as though the world were loosening
its careful boundaries.

What I once called faith
was only a lantern
I carried through uncertain weather.

But the dark has its own patience.
It waits until the eyes learn
another way of seeing.

I begin to understand
that the soul does not cross a border.

It deepens.

Mercy—
not as judgment reversed,
but as a quiet widening—
moves through the chambers of memory.

Old injuries soften.
Faces once sharp with anger
become human again.

I release them.

Their grief was never separate from mine.

Perhaps this is what forgiveness is:
not forgetting
but recognizing
how the same wind
has moved through every life.

And doubt—
the companion I feared—
turns gentle.

It does not destroy belief.
It opens space.

In that space
something immense breathes.

The future is not an answer
but a field.

Death itself
may be only the moment
when the soul realizes
how large it has always been.

Already the world feels lighter.
The walls between things
thin.

Time loosens its careful knots.

And if I go forward now
it is not from despair
nor from certainty
but from a quiet trust

that what receives us
has been listening
long before we began to speak.