The Weight I Carry

 

They folded your uniform

with the careful quiet
reserved for endings—
each crease a goodbye
no one dared to say aloud.

A flag replaced your warmth.
Cold metal took your voice.
And suddenly
the world spoke to me
in hushed fragments,
as if grief were fragile—
as if it might shatter
if named too clearly.

But they do not hear
the second heartbeat
I carry—
soft, insistent,
asking questions
my body cannot answer.

Your child
turns like a whisper
beneath my ribs,
like a story
still searching
for its beginning.

How do I tell this life
that its father
became memory
before it could become
a name on its lips?

At night,
I press your dog tags
against my skin—
metal meeting breath—
and for a moment
they warm,
as if memory itself
refuses to stay cold.

You left
in boots that promised return,
with laughter stitched
into your jacket pockets,
with tomorrow
still folded in your hands.

Now the wind
moves through your absence,
through sleeves
that remember shape
but not touch.

They say
you died for a nation—
a sentence too large
for the rooms you left behind.

Because here,
in the quiet
of our unfinished home,
I count the smaller wars:

a cradle
that will never know your hands,
a path
unwalked beside small feet,
a child
who will search your face
only in still photographs
that cannot blink back.

And yet—

I whisper your name
into the dark curve
of my becoming,
into the fragile future
growing inside me.

Because somewhere
between sorrow
and tomorrow,
between what was
and what will ache to be—

our child is learning

that love
does not end
where war begins.

-CHIPPY MOHAN