Poems for Birthdays in Heaven

We still buy the cake you chose, though nobody wants the corner piece now. Your birthday arrives without permission. The calendar does not apologize. We light one candle, not because we know where wishes go, but because memory needs a small action. Then someone tells your old joke. For one breath, grief and laughter sit at the same table.

Missing someone is not an emotion. It's a location. It's the specific spot on the couch where they used to sit that your body avoids without being told. It's the grocery aisle where you still reach for the thing they liked before your hand remembers there's no one to bring it home to. It's 7:14 PM on a Tuesday— the exact time you used to call and say nothing important, which was the most important part of your day. Missing someone is a phantom limb. The nerve endings still fire. Your brain still sends the signal: look left, they should be there. And every time they're not, you lose them a little again. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a paper cut that never quite closes. I miss you in the mornings most. Before the day builds its defenses— the tasks, the noise, the busy performance of being fine. In the morning there is just the bed, the light, the quiet where your voice used to be. People say it gets easier. They're not wrong. But easier is not the same as over. Easier means the ache moves from the center of your chest to somewhere behind your ribs— still there, just more polite about it. I carry you like a song stuck in my head. I didn't choose it. I can't stop it. And some days I don't want to because the missing is the last thread between us and if I stop pulling, I'm afraid the whole thing unravels. So I miss you. On purpose. With everything I have. Because missing someone is just love with nowhere to go.

The first year after someone dies is a minefield of ordinary things. Their coffee mug. Their side of the bed. The song that plays in the grocery store like a sniper you didn't see coming. You learn that grief is not the crying— that's the easy part. Grief is reaching for the phone to call them and remembering mid-dial that the number goes nowhere now. People say: they're in a better place. People say: time heals. People say many things that prove they have not yet lost someone who made the world make sense. The house is the same size but larger. The silence is the same silence but louder. Everything is the same except the one thing that made everything work. I don't want to move on. I want to move forward with you still in it— your laugh in the walls, your name in my mouth like a word I refuse to stop saying.