I think about how often I knew something was ending before I admitted it. Not because of a fight — because of a walk. Because of how someone held their body while they moved through a place with me. The world was doing what it always does — wind, heat, incline, distance. While something between us quietly shifted its weight.
I often write relationships through the environment because it lets emotion show itself without being named. A gaze that won’t turn toward the ocean. A back that stays a few steps ahead. A day so still it feels like the air is listening. Sometimes the landscape becomes the only honest witness. It records what happened in salt and dust. In the way the body remembers long after the mind wants to move on.
These are two poems about that. Two walks uphill, two kinds of weather, and two versions of what gets left behind.
The Taste of Salt
I can still taste the salt
beneath my tongue —
from the time we went
to that seaside town.
Wind in my face
as I walked up the hill,
your back ahead of me —
not looking at the ocean
to our left,
but straight ahead.
You brushed wet strands
from my forehead
with your thumb
when I caught up.
Years after you left me,
I still feel that wind —
seashells grazing
under my feet —
and still shake sand
from my sheets.
That’s the strange part about memory: it doesn’t stay in the mind. It stays in the body — salt, wind, grit in the corners of ordinary days.
A Conversation Between Trees
The day we went up the mountain,
the sun grazed my palm.
The town lay spread below us,
trying to draw breath
in the heat.
No wind could reach us.
The air was dense, still.
You kicked a stone —
it traveled down,
pulling dust up
in its wake.
The leaves still whisper
the words we left behind.
That is how
our story became
a conversation
between trees.
Some places don’t let the words disappear. They keep them, the way trees keep rings — quiet evidence that something happened there.
Have you ever had a walk like this? The landscape seemed to mirror what you couldn’t say. I’d love to hear it. What did the weather, the street, the hill, the shoreline tell you before the person did?
Related post: Emotional Landscapes: Poetry of the Months
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