Yesterday

I am the song that came from nowhere — fully formed, already whole, arriving like something remembered rather than written. Paul woke with me complete and spent weeks asking everyone around him: have you heard this before? He couldn't believe something this finished had simply appeared. It had. Some things arrive that way. Some griefs do too.

I am the shape grief makes before it has a name for itself. Not the howling kind. The quiet kind — the kind that sits at the kitchen table in the morning light and just notices. Notices that something is gone. Notices that you said something wrong. Notices that you cannot quite remember how it felt to be the person you were before. I am not about a specific woman. I am about the moment you realize something has left and you cannot name exactly when it went. That threshold between before and after. The border you can no longer cross.

I give people permission to grieve without explanation. I said something wrong — that's all. No drama, no villain, no clean edge. Just the quiet devastation of ordinary human failure. I hold the losses that don't have funerals. The ease you once had with someone you love. The version of yourself you used to be. The morning something unnamed came loose in your chest.

I have been played at funerals and bedsides, hummed in cars at 2am, felt by people who don't speak English but understand every word. Loss is the most universal language. Everyone has a yesterday they would return to if they could.

Yesterday isn't a place. It's a direction — the one you can never actually travel, no matter how badly you need to. I am the ache of that impossibility, and the proof that what you lost was real.

I am only two minutes long. I contain everything. I am the simplest thing, and that is why I am the one that lasts.