Salt and Cedar

They sit at opposite ends of the couch.

Between them: the sharp metallic tang of walls going up.

She’s smelled this before,
knows the chemistry of distance:
how skin changes when touch becomes treaty,
when bodies start speaking different languages.

First visit: they arrive in one cloud,
soap and coffee mingled.

Later: two distinct weather systems,
her jasmine, his cedar,
no longer finding each other in the air.

The guilty carry airports:
synthetic courage, yesterday’s clothes,
somewhere else clinging to their skin.

The betrayed carry ozone,
that pre-storm charge of knowing without knowing.

Today’s couple: she catches it immediately.

Not another lover, but something harder to name.

He carries closed doors, unopened mail,
the sour bloom of giving up while still showing up.

She carries trying too hard:
fresh bread at midnight, new perfume every week,
the desperate sweetness of performing for an empty theater.

Years of this: learning how hope differs from resignation,
how anger has a hundred signatures
from hot iron to cold ash.

The ones who make it carry rain:
something broken open, clean.

Their chemistry shifts session by session
until one day they arrive sharing air again,
their scents finding each other like memory.

But these two: she already knows.

Can smell the paperwork coming,
the division of molecules that once danced.

Still, she asks the questions,
holds space for what might resurrect.

After they leave, she opens windows,
lets autumn clean the air.

Stands in her empty office breathing:
sage smoke, leather chairs that have held a thousand griefs,
and underneath, faint but persistent:
the salt and cedar of tears becoming wisdom.