To Pura and Cheryl, in the Purple Cloud
A return to the love that never left me, even in absence.
I don’t know where the beginning went, or how I got so far from the warmth of your eyes, but I know this: when I close mine, I still feel you.
You are there, not as ghosts or echoes, but as the feeling that I was once deeply known and not asked to be anything but myself.
Sometimes I wish I could start again. Not to erase what came after, but to return to the before. To the slow blink of your eyes. To the way the world softened when you were near.
I wish I could curl up next to you in the quiet and say everything I never found the words for. I wish I could press my forehead to yours and tell you how much it still hurts to be here without you.
You made me feel like I belonged. Like the softest parts of me weren’t mistakes. And now that you’re gone, the silence feels heavier than it should.
If there is a purple cloud, a place between the stars and the skin of this life, I hope you’re there. Waiting. Safe. Still loving me as you always did, effortlessly, completely, without condition.
And if I’m still here for a while longer, just know:
You are with me in everything that is still beautiful. And when I finally make it back to you, I will run. I will kneel. I will hold you for so long that time will forget how to keep moving.
I miss you.
And I love you in every breath I didn’t know was shaped like your name.
This is devastatingly beautiful, like the ache of memory carved into language. Thank you for sharing something so intimate, so full of quiet longing and unspoken love. Every word feels like it’s wrapped in the softness of grief and the weight of having once been truly seen.
There’s a rare kind of stillness in this, like standing in the echo of someone who once made the world gentler. The way you describe being known “not as ghosts or echoes,” but as a feeling, that stayed with me. It’s not just remembrance; it’s embodiment. You carry them in the very structure of your breath.
The yearning to return (not to undo, but to feel again) was heartbreakingly honest. You’ve captured that liminal space between sorrow and gratitude, where missing someone becomes its own form of devotion. That purple, nebulaic cloud that acts as a quantum field that preserves information… what a gorgeous, tender image. I hope they’re there too.
Your love doesn’t read as lost. It reads as transformed, quiet but enduring, threaded into everything you still find beautiful. And that final line... it lingers. It’s one of those rare truths we can all feel but rarely say: that love continues, in the shape of absence, in the soundless syllables of names whispered without voice.
Thank you. Truly. For the courage to feel this fully, and to let us feel it too.