11/06/2026
One white daisy on a long stem against a deep blue that has no bottom to it.
That is all. That is the whole image. And it is enough to hold a year's worth of grief.
The blue is the particular blue of late evening in winter —
not black, not grey, but the specific color of a room after everyone has left it.
You are gone. I know this.
The knowing has not become easier with practice, only more familiar.
And yet: the daisy is white and open and standing in that deep blue
the way certain facts stand in the middle of grief that has no right to be beautiful.
You are here, too. Not in any way I can prove.
In the way the white persists against the blue without explanation or apology.
The love does not need the theology.
It does not require a story about where you went or why the daisy is there.
It only knows: the blue is the color of your absence
and the white in the center of it is what the love insists on placing there regardless.
Something white. Something open.
Something that refuses to take the color of the dark around it.
It is not that I have answers.
The blue does not offer any. The daisy does not explain its own presence.
It is that the love keeps placing something white and open
in the exact center of whatever darkness the day has arranged around it.
Keeps placing.
The deep blue holds the daisy the way evening holds everything —
without preference, without distinction, without warmth.
The daisy stands in it anyway, open, unreasonable, white.
— The Love I Lost
