The chair by the window remains empty,
its wooden arms polished by waiting.
Each morning, the father brings a cup of coffee
to the seat no one claims.
He talks to the silence
as if it were his boy—
the way he might have looked at forty-five,
with creases around the eyes,
a deeper voice,
a wife perhaps,
a child who would have called him grandfather.
But the war,
that thief with metal hands,
took his boy
before time could carve its lines of peace.
Twenty-five years
and still the father waits.
Time does not soften steel.
It rusts it.
And some days,
he cannot lift the spoon to his mouth
without hearing the report of rifles
echo in his bones.
He built a life after
More children,
Another home ,
More dreams
Because , that is what a father does
And yet he suffers
Because not to is to forget
People say you must move on,
as if grief is a thing that grows tired,
as if a father’s love
can be laid down like a rifle
after the ceasefire.
But the war never ends.
Not for him.
Not in the quiet corridors of morning
where his son’s laughter never walks.
Not in the birthdays skipped like stones
across a dry riverbed.
At night,
he hears a knock—
soft as dust.
Always,
he opens the door.
Always,
no one stands there.
In sleep,
his son is a boy again,
mud on his face,
grinning,
alive.
He wakes with the name on his tongue,
half-spoken.
And forgets,
for a breath,
what the world did to them both.
The father lives
in the echo of a vanished heartbeat.
And that is all.
That is everything.
Broken Author 