After Midnight

Past midnight, toward morning

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The water doesn’t end at midnight.

It continues...

warmer past the hour

than anyone expected.

There’s a depth

just beyond the shallows

where standing becomes swimming,

where the question stops being

should I

and becomes

how.

At midnight

the hands point the same direction

then separate.

One circles back.

One continues.

Only one

measures morning.

The voice that named fear wisdom

taught that moving forward

meant drowning.

But the water past midnight

has its own ground.

Darker, yes.

Deeper.

But ground.

And nothing about it

requires severance.

Thirty years is long exile.

Thirty more

is imaginable...

but not from the shallows.

Further in,

the water stills.

Not because it stops moving

but because the body

stops fighting.

The shallows

were never the destination.

Only the threshold.

The water continues,

warm and patient,

past midnight,

toward morning.

Holding what comes.

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-UpsilonA