Full Swing

A winter gust lifts the tire swing outside your bedroom window—
just an inch,
just enough to prove it hasn’t forgotten how to move.

A pendulum waiting
for someone’s weight.

---

Inside, you bend over a worksheet for children:
oversized letters, simple drawings,
an alphabet rearranged to remove uncertainty.
Your fingers rest on the page
as if it might keep you tethered.

Your brow tightens.
Your mouth gathers around a thought
that doesn’t quite survive the trip.
A sound escapes anyway—
surprised to find itself here.

---

I nod.
Touch your arm.
My smile holds.
My ribs don’t.

---

Outside, the swing taps the air—
a soft creak,
a half-hearted arc.
Its patience outlasts mine.

---

You try again.
A syllable slips free—
thin, tentative—
rolling toward the table’s edge
before disappearing.

Meanwhile my own thoughts—
emails, errands, the smell of something burning in the kitchen—
align themselves in a sharp, insistent row.
A flare of I need out of here
rises in me,
quick and hot as embarrassment.

I swallow it.
Not because I’m noble—
but because leaving would hurt you
more than staying hurts me.

---

You lift your eyes.
Still bright.
Still quick behind the sedation.
A brilliance working through a scrambled alphabet—
like a church sign missing half its letters,
the remaining ones flickering
in the wrong sequence,
meaning trapped under the static.

---

Weeks ago, a tiny rupture
in the left side of your astonishing brain
took out whole corridors—
a driverless car
through stained glass,
sending color across the floor
in unfamiliar angles.

Nothing is destroyed.
Nothing is intact.
Light comes in anyway,
but it makes new shapes
neither of us fully know.

---

We work the problems:
simple maps,
basic categories,
small logical steps.

Your breath trembles.
Your jaw resets.
You try again—
a sound,
a break,
a half-built word that collapses on itself.

I nod
though I don’t know
what I’m agreeing to.

---

Outside, the swing nudges forward—
once—
then back—
marking the widening distance
between what you understand
and what your mouth can hold.

The world outside keeps its rhythm.
Yours circles, hesitates,
reaches,
starts over.

A bird startles from the tree—
a shock of motion—
and for a moment,
I want to run with it.

---

You place a fingertip on a letter,
trace its edges,
searching for the idea it once carried.
You look up—
hopeful—
as if the missing pieces
might be hiding in my expression.

I wish they were.
God, I wish they were.

---

Your next attempt fractures:
“t—
t—
t…”
The rest of the word won’t follow.
Silence gathers between us
with the heaviness of news
we don’t want to name.

A small, traitorous thought
flares through me—
What if this is as far as we get?—
and I hate myself for thinking it
even as it blooms.

---

Still, we continue.
Word by word.
Failure by failure.
One fragile hit
for every few losses.

The swing outside exhales its slow arc—
not measuring progress,
not measuring grief,
just keeping time
in a world that keeps moving
even when we cannot.

---

Inside, your voice tries again.
Outside, the swing lifts,
falls,
lifts.

Winter holds its line.

We wait for the season
when the rope outside
will hold laughter again—
and your words,
however altered,
will return in shapes
we’ve never heard before
but can learn to love.

Until then,
I sit with you in this slow reconstruction,
listening for whatever survives the distance
between your mind
and the air.