Epektasis

It was grace—
not warm, not holy,
a pale flare
over frozen estates.

The morning had already been spent
passing your name
hand to hand
like cheap heat.

Your ears must have burned
the way frost bites metal
on railings at dawn.

You have not made shelter.
You’ve carved hallways of silence
through rooms,
split yourself—
hard face,
hidden face—
and left doors swinging wide
to winter.

Do you sleep in your car,
breathing steamed glass,
engine cooling in slow clicks of settling?

Those who pass you daily,
boots dark with slush,
carry help in pockets
they forget to open.

I wanted to step toward you
in that clearing of air.
I call it Grace—
keep naming it Grace,
the way we name the weak sun
even when it barely climbs.

Most days I want to be rid of you.
To climb the scaffolding of things,
reach above your head
and pull the frozen wires of routine
so the world would fall in line.

But then—
you at your desk,
hunched like a bird against weather,
small in fluorescent cold.
Not villain.
Not burden.
Almost human,
nearly child.

And it struck—
not as theory
or lessons learned indoors—
but as black ice does:
sudden, clean, unstoppable.

We are one salted field
after snowfall,
no footprints owned,
no borders holding.

Stone sober,
I stood in your place for a breath.
Then in the stranger’s place
I usually turn from.

It passed—
as thaw always does,
sliding back into grey.

But in that moment,
that white silence of grace,
I wanted to lift you
like a child fallen on concrete,
warm your hands with mine,
set the world right for you

for once.

Let this cold light return.
Let it find me again
before the dark closes early.