William Hromada

Confidence

Your words arrive like quiet dawn

through the cracks of my doubt,

soft, insistent light.

They don’t shout.

They just stand beside me

until the room in my chest

is wide enough to breathe.

I borrow their certainty

the way a candle borrows flame—

one small wick, suddenly unafraid

because you leaned close

and said, simply,

you can.

And in that moment

the old house I live in

stops apologizing for its creaks.

I open every curtain.

I walk loud.

I stay.

 

You Are My World

Before you, the sky was only weather.

Then you opened your eyes

and the blue rearranged itself into oceans

I had never sailed,

continents I suddenly needed to name.

You are the gravity I orbit without complaint.

Every sunrise borrows its gold from your skin,

every night returns it,

quietly,

the way a tide returns shells to the same shore

because it cannot bear to keep them.

If the map of my days were folded small enough

to fit inside a locket,

your heartbeat would be the clasp

that keeps the whole world from spilling out.

You are the quiet yes beneath every noise,

the reason stars bother to burn

when no one asked them to.

I was a room with one window;

you walked in

and became all the light

I will ever need

to see the rest of my life.