The Liver Doctor

Three nights of ink and moonlight. 

I didn’t just read The Liver Doctor... 

I sat at the bedside of strangers, 

their families, and beloveds, and hopes crushed,

hands held,

consuming their histories until the hours blurred. 

Three consecutive nights, 

just before the world turned inward, 

I let these pages hold me.

It has been an age since a book felt this alive...

since I felt the sudden, sharp friction of the drama 

between the pulse and the silence. 

It forced me to sit with the weight of it all: 

the fragile choreography of life, 

the slow surrender of death, and 

everything messy and magnificent that breathes in the space between.

I see the hand that holds the pen: a master physician, 

who knows that the best medicine is often 

just the act of looking, truly looking. 

Dr. Abby is an observer of the human fray, 

cataloging the micro-expressions of hope 

and the slow, intricate retreat of the spirit. 

As a poet, I recognize that gaze; 

I bow to the patience of that craft.

And that ending: 

a quiet, resonant bow to a story well-told. 

It didn’t just close the book; it left a lingering note in the dark, 

inviting me to carry the reflection 

into the waking light of the next day.

Alchemy of companionship

Seven years is not just time.

 

It is a slow, steady tide

The way the water shapes the stone, not by force, 

but by the relentless, quiet insistence of returning.

We have been a geography of shifting landscapes. 

Two people, once separate, 

slowly knitting a single horizon. 

I think of the small, unrecorded histories: 

the shared air, 

the way the silence between us has changed its texture, 

no longer an empty space, 

but a substance: a soft, anchoring hum that grounds the day.

We do not hold on by gripping tight. 

We hold on by letting the seasons cycle through us, 

by weathering the droughts and the sudden, lush growth of being truly known. 

Seven years of witnessing: 

you have seen the versions of me that I have already shed, and 

I have stood watch over the shadows you have outgrown.

This is the alchemy of companionship. 

We are mirrors that have stopped reflecting our own faces and began, instead, to see the other as the primary landscape of our lives.

There is no sudden arrival. 

There is only the long, beautiful transit of staying: 

of choosing to be the person who wakes up in the same gravity, 

in the same light, and knowing, 

with the deep, quiet rhythm of the heart that 

we are exactly where we intended to be all along.