This one is destined for the verb to stay..
Not the redundant and passive activity of not moving, but the active choosing of remaining behind and being there for those one cares about the most..

I don’t know whether I should address you or the humans that should invoke you and hold your ideals, but I think it is easier to talk to you, the verb because ironically, you’re more prone to listening than us, creatures with malfunctioning ears…

It dawned on me, ever slightly and in increments, how far removed we are from you…
We think we have you…
We assume it’ll be easy for those around us to heed your way and remain faithful to us in our mess…
And we suppose that we too would do the same for them, with our connections outlasting time, never to be severed…
Yet, that’s rarely the case with us humans…
The unthinkable does come, and intimacy is forgone by coldness and apathy…
And the realisation that those whom we hold dear are not dispensable to our existence creeps in slowly but surely, taking away from us the last mental block that prevents us from releasing the bonds we thought we held dear…

That is scary…
For this thought process is seldom in sync among parties signatory to the invisible agreement to stay…
One side grows colder by the minute, yet the other might still think everything is alright…
And when the moment of truth comes, and the alright is all but right…
Staying gives way to Trauma…
Like an earthquake, uninvited, razing years of toil in a blink of an eye…

My personal experience with you, like most of my fellow humans, did involve such moments of having the rug pulled suddenly from underneath my feet…
And while I thought stuff like that happen once in one’s lifetime because surely you’d make sure to inform fate and fate would not allow someone to suffer such a thing more than once, but apparently, something of that sort happened between you and fate and you are no longer on the same terms…
But once one is struck, forevers and evers become a form of wishful thinking that one hesitate to surrender to…

I want to believe in you, but you yourself wouldn’t stay sometimes…
You exist. I’m sure of that. But where is your dwelling?

And yet, I still hold on to the thought that you are achievable…
Maybe if both sides recognise you and not take you for granted…
Talk to you every day and nurture you with bouts of awareness and intentionality of living…
Maybe if parties never grow weary of putting before you their inner vulnerability…
Then you’d make an abode and stay.