Isabelle Cherry wrote this poem for the Art of Writing Spring 2025 course “Writing the Limits of Empathy” taught by Alan Tansman. This essay is a finalist in the Spring 2025 Art of Writing Student Essay Contest.
Every morning begins
with the soft ticking
of time before grief.
Before she knew what the sound
of nothing meant —
the space left
after the train passed,
after his body
was carried off the rails
without a mark of anger,
only silence,
as though he had been chosen
by a quiet wind.
In those early days,
she still moved
as if through honey.
The baby’s cry — distant.
The stove flame — small as a secret.
Her body,
still full of milk and memory,
searched the hallway
for his shoes.
She had handed him a bell,
silver and ringing —
a gesture small and loving
enough to follow him
into the dark.
She did not know
it would become
the only sound left.
The soundtrack of mourning
is not a score.
It is a held breath,
the scuff of slippers
on old wood,
a teacup set down
too softly to be heard.
Time passes,
Waves paint the ground,
the sea has no memory
and forgets no one.
She marries a widow,
a man whose own grief
sits beside him
like a loyal dog.
He never asks her
to explain the shadows
that follow her.
He listens to her silence
with more care
than others listen to words.
He knows
when she looks out
toward the gray water,
she is not watching the sea —
she is listening
for footsteps that will not return.
His love
is not a fire,
but a quiet lantern.
He lights it
and leaves it
on the windowsill.
Tamio,
who knows
that to hold someone in grief
is not to pull them back,
but to stand
at the edge
of their silence,
and wait
with your hands open.
Yuichi runs
like a boy should,
Untouched
by the gravity
that holds the grown.
One night,
a bell between them.
A memory.
An argument with no villain.
Tamio drinks.
The room tilts.
She breaks,
not loudly,
but like frost
cracking a leaf.
And then,
she walks —
not away,
but toward the unknowing.
A funeral procession
rises like mist.
She follows it,
as if grief had a body
she could speak to.
She stays.
She waits
for the sound of the bell
in his pocket.
For the reason
he left her
with a child,
with a silence
that has never stopped ringing.
Tamio finds her there.
He does not rush.
He does not ask.
He sits in the car
until she is ready
to return to the world.
She says:
“I only want to know why.”
And he replies,
gently,
as if each word
might bruise her:
Maybe it was something
that called to him.
Like the lights my father saw —
dancing in the distance.
Maybe it wasn’t death.
Maybe it was just…
somewhere else.
And for once,
she is still.
The silence that follows
is not absence —
it is acceptance.
Slowness here
is a kind of mercy.
It allows grief
to be noticed,
not survived.
It allows a woman
to pause in her mourning,
and a man
to sit beside her
with no need
to fill the silence.
What draws us away
is not always despair.
Sometimes it is longing.
Sometimes it is love
so full
it slips
into another world.