By Gracie Hosie
The chair was never empty,
but god, it felt like it.
You were there—keys on the counter,
TV humming,
your footsteps soft and steady down the hall.
But your silence?
It was the loudest thing in the house.
I learned early how to read a room
by the weight of your sighs,
how to hold my stories
like secrets,
because you never asked.
And when you did,
your eyes were already elsewhere—
lost in some static no one else could hear.
I stopped trying to reach you
after a while.
Because reaching started to feel
like begging.
And I was too young
to know I deserved more
than nods and half-listens
and the kind of love
that only shows up in doing,
not feeling.
You were present like wallpaper—
there,
but fading.
Reliable in routine,
but unreachable in heart.
I’d sit beside you
craving a glance, a real one,
one that said
“I see you,”
but it never came.
Just the weather, the news,
a muttered “mhm.”
And still, I loved you
like sunflowers love sun—
stretching toward what little I could find,
growing crooked,
but growing anyway.
I carried your absence
like a quiet inheritance,
like a wound that never broke skin
but bruised everything beneath.
Now, I find it hard to speak
without apologising first.
I wait for people to drift
the way you did—
in plain sight.
And when they stay,
when they feel me,
it startles something
deep and trembling in my ribs.
Because you were there.
But not with me.
Not in the way I needed.
And I know you probably thought
you did your best.
But love without presence
is like water in a locked glass—
just out of reach
for the child who’s thirsty
and still learning
how to ask.
