Empty Stadium - Still Living With Us
By the time the gates unlock the sky holds the color of their old shawls faded serviceable and warm if you stand still. The watchman knows my wave and opens with the easy kindness of men who have watched many sons grow older without their parents watching back.
I choose the outer lane longer on purpose because grief prefers a detour. The first lap is for inventory ankles lungs and the part of me that still waits for their number on my phone. The second lap is for my mothers voice folding mornings into tea telling me to add a little more salt to the day. The third lap belongs to my fathers walk steady and unhurried and I let my stride borrow his shape.
A boy arrives with a bat too tall for his wrists and calls out for his mother without thinking. The word echoes across the field and does not bruise me today and that is the grace I carry forward.
By the fifth lap the grass smells like their balcony plants after rain and I look for them the way a habit looks for an old switch in a new house and the track answers only with left foot right foot stay.
The seventh lap tells me the truth that I will not return to before but I can return to them differently through her recipes learned by feel through his way of fixing loose things with patience and through the way they both said come home like a sentence with room inside it.
When the sun underlines the field I slow. A dog sleeps in the shade and breathes like an old metronome. I walk with the quiet that comes after crying and stretch the tightness of a whole year and the body gives back a little more than I asked and I call that inheritance.
On the way out the watchman asks how many and I say enough the way my father answered questions he did not want to teach with. He laughs and I let him keep it.
Outside the city is louder than memory. I carry a pocket of track quiet home where my wife is boiling tea the way my mother did without measuring and when I say good run she hears the rest that I ran with them today and they kept pace.
