An Impossible Integration

You were never one thing,
never a number I could hold
but a curve that stretched beyond sight,
a breath vanishing before I could measure it.

You did not leave all at once
It happened in fractions–
A series of fractions,
like a swimmer in a medley,
the split-second glide
between butterfly and backstroke—
chest rising, arms sweeping wide,
water slipping past...

You were here.

And then—

a sliver less.

A breath misplaced,
a hand that I always approach but can never reach

A house does not mourn its missing brick,
but the wind moves differently through the gap
Even in absence, you shape the air.

So I break you down—
Slope of smiles,
Frequency of handwritten notes
Amplitude of digital waves,
I try to plot your shadow that once spilled
across the greenhouse floor at dawn.

I gather these fragments like dew drops on grass,
each moment an infinitesimal gasp—
thin as the space between letters in a word,
too small to hold, too many to count.

But no sum is ever whole.

No matter how finely I slice the past,
you slip between the limits,
between what was and what remains.

And yet, the answer lingers—
not in the pieces I try to collect,
but in the way they stretch towards infinity,
in the empty space they leave behind.