I sit in your presence, but you do not greet me.
Friends to the right and the left, but I am alone.
How shall I respond to this chasmic isolation?
Shall I sit and wait in the pain of your silence;
shall I get up and make my way without you?
For want of connection, I choose to move on.
Friends watch me leave but they do not follow.
Strangers meet my eye but do not ask my name.
I travel the crowded byways without company.
Worst of all, you — you — do not walk with me.
Tell me, I beg, that there is another way to live.
Let “I will be with you” not be a vacant promise
even amidst solitude, even through loneliness,
even in your house where the silence deafens.