A Friend

A Friend

In the quiet hallway of a day‑long march,
a hand appears—steady, warm, unassuming—
the kind that makes the stones beneath our feet feel softer.

We meet at the crossroads of ordinary moments:
the coffee cup that spills, the laugh that stalls,
the silence that asks, “Are you still here?”

A friend is the echo that returns
when you whisper your doubts into the air,
the steady drumbeat that steadies your own—
a rhythm you never knew you’d been missing.

They are the lighthouse on a fog‑cloaked shore,
not because they blaze, but because they keep the light on,
allowing you to navigate the swell of your own doubts
without ever fearing the tide’s relentless pull.

When the world cracks open with its sharp, sudden edges,
they become the seam that stitches the ragged seams,
the gentle stitch of gold thread through a tattered quilt—
warming, unremarkable, yet impossible to replace.

And in the night, when the sky forgets to hold the stars,
they are the constellations you can trace with your eyes closed,
reminding you that even darkness is mapped by memory,
by the soft, unasked‑for presence of another heartbeat.

So let the world turn its pages, relentless, relentless—
the story of you and me, of all our small, stubborn moments—
for in the margin, between the lines of ordinary days,
a friend writes the poem we never thought we could read.