Where did you go?

Where did you go, the person we knew for so long?
Did it happen slowly over years, without our noticing,
or suddenly in that unexpected triggering? Who can
say and yet, at some point, it was clear, you had put on
new costume, covered the self we had known for so
long, and made your way into a new world where we,
it seemed, could not follow, removed as it was from
all we had known together; alien, unwelcoming and
so strange to who you had been for yourself, and for us.


We could see you, but not touch you, in that way
we once had done. You were there in physical form,
but gone in other ways, as if you had never been.
It was and is, a death without a body or any finality,
which allows no time or place for grieving, even as,
the grief grows, broad and deep across the remains
of the days we had known and shared together. Where
did you go, the person we knew for so long? Are you
still there, in that nature which was so familiar to us,
and to yourself? Unlike real death, will there be a
resurrection unto Self, and unto us? No-one can say.


But it teases, that possibility because how can one's
nature be erased? It must remain as the foundation of who
and what you were and are. And so all we can do is
wait. Perhaps it is time to stop asking: Where did you go?
And to simply trust, that you will return, in your own
good time, for how can it be possible that someone can
leave themselves, and those they love and who love
them in return, behind? The time for questions is past.
We wait, patiently, until you return to yourself and to us.