The Unkept Promise

The Unkept Promise

We said the future like a password,

palms together over the match.

The flame nodded, small and obedient,

as if it knew our names would be enough.

We shelved a summer in a jar—

peach pits, ticket stubs, the receipt

for a couch we never bought.

You laughed, and the room believed you.

Time did what time does:

turned the jar into a museum,

the museum to a rumor,

The rumor of a drawer we never opened.

When the letter came due,

I unfolded the calendar:

Boxes like empty rooms,

Each day, there was a light switch that wouldn’t answer.

I kept the key anyway,

wore it on a thread against my throat—

a quiet metal hope

that unlocked only the sound of itself.

Promises age oddly.

Some turn into chairs we sit in

without noticing.

Others become doors painted shut.

Yours learned the art of vanishing:

First, the date dissolved,

then the place,

then the promise itself, leaving only

the shape my hand made when it reached.

I wanted a reason with boots on—

tracks I could follow through the weather.

Instead, silence, immaculate,

polite as a closed store on Sunday.

So I made a smaller vow,

the kind of person a person can carry alone:

to water what answers,

to walk with what stays,

to forgive the ghost of a door

and build a window there instead.

Now the light arrives unannounced.

I open it, let it cross the room,

and sit where it lands—

no passwords, just breath—

the promise I keep to myself,

daily, like bread.