Somewhere Between The Last Step And The First Return Poem by Oscar Auliq-Ice

I live in the pause between answers,
in the soft hesitation
after a question has already been spoken
but before the world decides what it means.

There are days I still wake up
with the instinct to call someone "home, "
and then remember I am the one
who now signs the papers,
pays for the light,
and watches the kettle as if it has secrets
older than my name.

I am not what I was,
but I have not yet learned
how to stop reaching backward
as if time were a staircase
I might still descend
if I move quietly enough.

Some mornings I catch myself
standing at the mirror too long,
waiting for the version of me
that used to arrive without effort—
the one who believed in days
as if they were guaranteed outcomes,
not negotiations with uncertainty.

That version does not come.

Instead, I see the overlap:
a child still living in my posture,
an adult pretending not to notice
how often he asks permission
from ghosts of simpler certainty.

I remember a time
when the world was either near or far,
never both at once.
A place had a direction.
A person had a single shape.
Even silence knew its role.

Now everything arrives in gradients—
not arrival, not departure,
but the endless negotiation
between becoming and having been.

There are evenings I sit
at the edge of ordinary rooms
and feel the furniture aging faster than I do,
as if it has already accepted
what I am still trying to understand:
that nothing stays where it is asked to.

Even memory is unfaithful in this way—
it returns dressed differently each time,
sometimes younger than it should be,
sometimes older than I am ready to meet.

I have learned to recognize
the moment in conversations
when I am expected to know more
than I actually do,
and the quieter moment afterward
when I realize I said nothing
that truly belonged to me.

There is a strange geography
to this in-between life—
not here, not there,
but the narrow bridge
that insists it is wide enough
for all contradictions to pass through safely.

Sometimes I walk it willingly.
Sometimes it collapses under me
and I am left suspended
in a kind of honest confusion
that no longer pretends to resolve itself.

I used to think growing up
meant arriving somewhere solid,
a place where questions stop echoing
and certainty becomes furniture.

Now I suspect it is the opposite:
to grow up is to remain
in the echo long enough
to hear your own voice
change its mind.

There are moments—small, unannounced—
when I catch a fragment of the child I was
standing just behind my thoughts,
still believing that every door
must lead somewhere intentional.

He does not speak to me.
He simply watches
as I learn how many doors
open onto the same uncertainty.

And I, in turn, try not to frighten him
with what I know now:
that arrival is often just another form of waiting,
and waiting is sometimes
the only honest shape of being.

Still, I move forward.
Not because I am sure,
but because stillness has begun to feel
like another kind of forgetting.

And so I remain here—
between the last step I understood
and the first one I cannot yet name,
carrying both versions of myself
like overlapping weather systems
that refuse to choose a single sky.

If there is a destination,
it has not introduced itself.

If there is a homecoming,
it is still learning my face.

Until then, I live in the in-between—
not lost, not found,
but listening carefully
to the thin, trembling space
where both might be true.