OR: conjunction used to indicate an alternative, the equivalent or substitutive character of two words, or approximation. It also denotes a logical operator (disjunction) - Merriam-Webster
The word appeared between two commas -
that still holds water.
Morning light tilted across the table;
the kettle clicked its thin impatience.
Nothing was wrong -
which was the problem.
I have learned this much:
or is not loud.
It does not shout like never
or bloom like always.
It waits -
polite, exact -
until the mind trips over it
and the heart must answer.
I stood there counting details
the way one does when delaying truth:
the blue rim of the mug,
a fly testing the window,
the taste of yesterday’s sleep.
Stay or go -
the room pretended not to notice
how the air thickened.
There is a cost to choosing,
and a different cost to not.
One future tightens its knots quietly;
the other loosens something essential.
I try to measure them -
as if loss were a distance
that could be mapped,
as if the unchosen life
did not continue somewhere
without me.
Tell me -
where does or catch you unprepared?
In the pause before speaking,
or the silence after?
Which weighs more on your days:
what you held onto,
or what you let pass
because it asked too much?
I am suspicious of clean decisions.
They rarely tell the truth.
Most choices arrive like weather -
part forecast, part surprise -
and I step into them anyway,
knowing the moment I move
the other path closes
with a sound so small
it will take years
to recognize it as grief.
Still, I choose.
Or learns my name that way.
Not as certainty,
but as practice -
standing still long enough
to notice what I cannot carry forward,
and what - despite fear, despite love -
I must.
GBS jr
2010
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