The sky doesn’t burn the way you expect —
not sudden, not violent,
but slow, like a secret finally spoken,
spreading from the edges of everything
until the whole horizon
is speaking in colors
you forgot you knew.

And there you are.

A pale blue ghost on pale brown ground,
small enough to be forgotten,
moving with the quiet certainty
of someone who has already made peace
with getting there late.

The road holds you the way time holds
the things we loved and lost —
loosely, tenderly,
without judgment.

Behind you, the city bleeds its white lights
into the bruised and burning clouds —
those tiny scattered sparks
hovering above the treeline
like old wishes
that never found the right address.

You drive through them all.

Through the beautiful indifference of dusk.
Through the silence that swells
between one heartbeat and the next.
Through every mile that does not know your name
and does not need to.

What is a road if not a kind of mercy —
the one direction the earth offers
to those who cannot stay?

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What is a sunset
if not the world reminding you
that endings, too,
can be made magnificent?

There is a faith in this kind of moving —
not the faith of maps and destinations,
but something older,
something written in the way dust rises
behind a moving thing
and then, slowly,
settles back
into the shape of where it came from.

Go, then.

Let the fire of the sky
trace its orange fingers across your roof.
Let your shadow stretch behind you
like a life you are slowly leaving.
Let the open road ahead
hold all the questions
you have not yet learned to ask —

because the light does not wait,
and the distance does not warn you,
and beauty —
when it comes for you —
comes wearing the face
of everything you almost didn’t notice.

Drive toward it.

Whatever it costs. Drive toward it.