The God of Familiar Things

I came thinking language might be enough

to rebuild what time had loosened.

You were already halfway into the night

before I could name what I needed from you.

You were already drinking when I got there

like it had started earlier than the conversation

like I had arrived in the middle of something

I wasn’t part of but still had to stand inside.

You kept your hand around the drink

the way people hold something

they don’t intend to put down.

And still there was warmth.

That part matters.

The way you looked at me like I was known.

Like I hadn’t been reduced to distance or history.

There was care in it.

And something like love, or its echo.

Something my body recognized

before my mind could question it.

Like familiarity has its own logic.

Like it finds its way in without asking.

But recognition isn’t the same as safety.

Chemistry isn’t the same as trust.

And I felt myself trying to hold both truths

in the same breath

without letting either one collapse the moment.

The closeness was real.

So was the fracture underneath it.

I kept waiting for a signal

that the ground between those things

had changed.

Instead it held steady

in a way that didn’t feel steady at all.

Like standing near something familiar

that no longer guarantees where it ends.

And I think that’s what stayed with me

after I left

not absence

not confusion

but the feeling of being close enough

to remember everything clearly

and still not able to trust what closeness does.

Detail from page 55 of Carl Jung’s The Red Book (Liber Novus) depicting a solar barge. Courtesy of the Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung.