Bobby Baldacchino

I didn’t leave
to find peace.
I left
because staying
felt too sharp.
Too full
of empty.

Breathing around me,
but I felt
like air wasn’t mine anymore.
I walked past faces
that didn’t see me.
Not really.

The boat waited—
small, like me.
Unnoticed,
barely holding shape
in the grey.

I set off
without direction,
not looking back.
What would be the point?
Yet every now and then
I caught myself ….
Looking back.

A song played
somewhere beneath the silence.
Not loud.
Not hopeful.
Just
there.
There like something broken
still trying to hum.
A record arriving to its center
Skipping
Click…….Click……Click

The sea didn’t welcome me.
It didn’t care
Why should it?
It just stretched on,
cold and endless,
a mirror
for the weight I carried
and couldn’t name.

Waves brushed the boat
like distant fingers,
Even the wind
seemed tired.

I sat,
still,
until the silence inside me
matched the silence around me.

I didn’t cry.
Not then.
The tears had dried
Years ago,
like salt on skin
Cracked and brittle.

I thought maybe
if I stayed out long enough,
I’d forget
how it felt.

But memory is a tide
that always returns,
bringing back the same wreckage, the same shit
just arranged
a little differently.

I let it come.

The loneliness.
The regret.
The slow ache
of remembering

There was no epiphany.
No sudden sun.
No great revelation.
Just the sound
of a song
I didn’t know the words to
but sang anyway.

Because silence
needs company sometimes.

And maybe that’s enough
for now.