Without You, My Existence Drifts

Ushiku, Minami 2-18-38, Ibaraki 300-1222, Japan

Without you, my existence drifts—
no embered threshold to welcome the ache,
no star-mapped path to hush my roaming,
no anchor in the surge that swallows light.

The wind becomes a hollow hymn,
threading secrets through the veins of trees;
no pulse stirs beneath the rough earth,
no breath from soil’s silent tomb.

My home—your gift from unseen depths,
walls steeped in your slow-burning patience,
mortar veined with clay and ancestral ash,
each grain of sand a vow folded in time.

The road I walk is stitched across your chest—
a dark ribbon of pitch and earthen heat,
where strangers flicker and dissolve,
and dusk folds time into a closed hand.

Even in absence, your cadence remains—
the silence that steadies the storm’s breath,
a rhythm pressed into the bones of earth;
I find you where riverbed and thunder meet.

Each stone beneath me murmurs your name,
the wind unspools your breath through trembling leaves;
you are the low hum behind my days,
the velvet shadow that hushes my sleep.

I knelt once where your shadow lingers—
pressed my palm into the parched soil,
earth warm with age beyond memory,
its scent rising like smoke from hidden fire,
and waited for the hush to answer back.

In your rhythm, my strength is soldered—
a filament of silver drawn through marrow,
holding the shards of me
in a shape that refuses to vanish.

Are you merely earth and mineral,
or the first dream the cosmos dared to cradle—
the loom where breath and sorrow weave,
the witness to all my scattering and return?

I carry your hush inside my veins,
your fire mirrored in the mouth of morning,
your grief ringing through the knuckles of rain.

And if I fled beyond the atom’s edge,
into the hush between galaxies—
would your gravity still arc toward me,
your silence nest beneath my skin?

Or am I always your child,
tethered not by blood but memory,
the story you keep tracing through my steps,
the home I only now begin to name?

Without you, I do not vanish—
but I unravel,
thread by thread,
across the loom of longing,
rooted still in soil and memory.



-Pradeep R. Varadwaj 

Pradeep R. Varadwaj is a spiritual seeker and computational chemist based in Japan. His writing explores the intersections of nature, consciousness, and the sacred, reflecting on how the mysteries of the world and the human spirit intertwine.