The Weight of Unspoken words

Here I sit in twilight's hollow grace,

Words trapped like moths against frosted glass;

Our bond, a withered garden that could have bloomed,Had wisdom not arrived so cruelly late.

Young legs dangling from that hotel bed,

Polyester sheets rough against my palms,

When your words crashed like winter thunder,

Shattering my world into glittering shards.

My hero, whose shoulders seemed to touch the sky, Whose laughter could chase storms away,

Now stood before me, transformed and strange,

A familiar face wearing an stranger's eyes.

Childhood died that day, buried deep

In a coffin made of silence and shame.

Fear and doubt, my constant friends,

Compressed like coal beneath years of pain.

I sought refuge in poison's sweet embrace,

While watching mother; once a summer rose,

Wilt beneath grief's relentless shade, Her spirit draining into bathroom tiles.

Through tear-stained eyes, we watched her fall,

Our queen reduced to trembling hands

And midnight sobs that echoed through

The paper-thin walls of our new life.

From Massena's streets, alien and cold,

To campground dirt beneath our feet,

We drifted like autumn leaves scattered

Far from the tree that gave us life.

Now standing where you once stood,

Years stretched between like desert miles,

I see through a father's weathered eyes:

A boy who grew up grasping empty air,

Who vowed his children would never know

The ache of empty Christmas mornings,

Or shame of threadbare hand-me-downs,

You built us castles from your broken dreams.

While you lay alone in midnight's depth,

Wrestling demons we refused to see,

We took your sacrifice like summer rain,

Expected, unthanked, and quickly gone.

The whiskey on your breath was really

All those words you couldn't speak,

The pride you drowned in amber grief,

The love we never learned to show.

Now you're gone,eternal silence falls

Where gratitude should have filled the air.

Your coffee cup still stains the desk,

A ring of memories I can't erase.

I am you now: the silent struggle,

The weight of expectations pressing down,

The love that fills my chest so full

It aches for want of voice to speak it.

Father, in this late-night hour,

When regret sits heavy as a stone,

I finally speak these words to stars

That twinkle cold as memory:

Thank you for the sleepless nights,

The calloused hands, the dreams deferred.

I understand now; far too late,

Your love was in the silence too.