Reaching For You · WonderWander

Reaching For You

Greetings and Blessings, my friends. I decided to share something personal with you all today.

In about November of last year, I noticed that I hadn't heard from my older brother in at least 6 months. I tried sending messages, but he had no access to any accounts, so I met only dead air. I spent the next seven months or so trying to find him. I honestly wasn't even sure if he was alive.

I eventually made the decision to file a welfare check report in his last known location. I was put on the phone with an officer, who immediately put my fears to bed, saying that he knows Johnny very well, and sees him every day. My brother is homeless, without a phone, and one of his crazy exes changed all the passwords for all his accounts, effectively locking him out. He didn't know anyone's number, so he had no way of contacting family.

I have since spoken to him a few times. He's doing ok, working on getting housing.

During that year, I struggled a lot under the surface. He was always on my mind, a constant reaching with no response, and I did what I always do - I wrote. My soul is healed now that I've found him, but, for a time, all I could feel was the empty space. I wanted to share a poem that I wrote during my search. For anyone who has experienced the quiet fading of a loved one, or anyone vanishing themselves.

Reaching For You

I keep calling into the shape you left behind -

An eternity of unanswered rooms

Where your voice used to lean against the walls—

Now only dust remembers the weight of you.

The memory of you keeps its teeth in me.

I imagine you in fragments:

A light that never quite let you rest,

A doorway you did not mean to walk through,

Streets that swallowed your direction and did not return it.

I have called into your distance,

And stood in the strange faith of my own echo.