Missing Pieces

I used to think missing pieces were mistakes—

lost buttons, unanswered questions,

corners of myself I should have kept better track of.

I searched the floor for them,

retraced my steps,

held my breath as if stillness

might return what wandered away.

But some pieces don’t fall.

They leave.

Not in anger.

Not in drama.

They go the way seasons do—

quietly, without apology,

certain they have already done

what they came to do.

There are gaps in me shaped like people,

like moments that never learned how to stay.

Spaces where laughter once leaned,

where a future almost sat down.

For a long time, I tried to fill them—

with effort, with meaning,

with becoming smaller so nothing else would slip out.

But absence has a language.

It doesn’t ask to be repaired.

It asks to be acknowledged.

Some missing pieces are not holes.

They are windows.

They let light in at angles

I would never have chosen.

Others are thresholds—

proof that something real passed through here,

that I loved, that I trusted,

that I dared to be changed.

I am not incomplete.

I am shaped.

Shaped by what stayed.

Shaped by what could not.

Shaped by the grace of learning

that wholeness is not symmetry—

it is truth.

I carry what remains

without bitterness.

I honor what’s gone

without chasing it home.

And where the pieces are missing,

I stand—

not broken,

not empty,

but open.

— Flower InBloom