Lighthouse Wife

I married a man of the sea.

Salt lives deep in his bones.
The horizon rests in his eyes
like something he once chased
and never fully left behind.

They told me the war was over.

The uniform folded.
The medals sleeping in a drawer.
The world moving forward
as if violence were a season
that knew how to end.

But some wars do not stay
where they were fought.

They travel quietly in the marrow.
They rise like weather in the skull.
They walk the corridors of memory
with boots no one else can hear.

Sometimes he speaks of it.

A flash of steel.
A sound that tore the sky apart.
A moment when the living world
became something that did not breathe.

Other memories remain sealed
behind doors that even love cannot open.

I have learned the languages of silence.

The tightening of his jaw
when a sudden noise cracks the air.

The way his eyes drift far beyond the room
as if the past has reached forward
and taken him by the collar.

I have learned how to sit beside a ghost
and pretend the chair is empty.

Some nights he sleeps
like a man safely returned to shore.

Other nights
the ocean comes back for him.

He thrashes through darkness
breathing like someone drowning
in waters no one else can see.

I place my hand against his chest
and wait for the storm to pass.

But the hardest hours are the quiet ones.

The small, ordinary moments
when the phone rings into silence
longer than it should.

My heart becomes a lighthouse
turning slowly through the dark
searching the horizon
for a ship that will not answer.

People speak of courage
as if it belongs only to battlefields.

They do not speak of the courage
it takes to stay.

To wake each morning
with ghosts pressing their cold hands
against the glass of your mind.

To walk through daylight
while carrying a night
that never completely ends.

Still he rises.

Still he breathes.

And every night
before sleep finally finds me
I listen carefully
in the dark beside him.

Because I married a man of the sea.

And once
more than once
he tried to sail past the edge of this world.

So I lie awake beside
the tide of his breathing

like a lighthouse

praying

the ocean does not take him

before morning.