Where No Love Grows

 

He holds an encyclopedia of hurt—
its pages smell of dust,
iron, and lilac smoke.
Every word an echo
of his mother’s decisions—
the ones that carved small altars
into his bones.

When he reads it,
the lamps flicker.
Ghosts of his past selves
step softly from the corners—
the boy with wet eyes and silence in his throat,
the youth who tried to burn
every tender thing he touched,
the man who listens now
to the wind as if it might forgive him.

They gather around his desk,
their shadows whispering
like old paper set aflame,
and he writes—
each sentence a resurrection,
each paragraph a spell
to summon light
from the long corridors of loss.

Outside, the desert hums—
an expanse of longing
where no love grows
without pain first rooting itself
in the heart’s dry soil.
He’s learned this truth:
from ruin comes language,
from ache, the sacred ink.

Some nights he thanks her—
the mother who became
a storm he had to survive—
for teaching him
how to find beauty
in the wreckage.
The encyclopedia closes,
but still,
the ghosts turn the pages.