13 Days of Halloween: The Language Between by Carrie Farrar

I. Ursula, Who Heard Me Differently

You didn’t flinch when I spoke in pattern
fingers drumming the table’s edge,
the air shimmering between syllables.
You heard the meaning inside the rhythm,
not the mess of words around it.
Your gaze was a small cathedral
where my noise found room to breathe.
Even silence widened for us,
its wings brushing the walls of your patience.
You said nothing sacred was ever smooth
that breaking was another way of shining.
And I believed you.
In your voice, the world stopped
sorting me by mistake.
Sometimes I think you translated
what the light was saying
the soft fluorescent hum
I thought was loneliness
but you called music.
I wanted to keep that frequency
the one where I wasn’t wrong,
just bright in a different register.
If I could return, I’d tell you
I was listening too
learning your language of calm,
learning how mercy hums.

II. For Ursula, in Frequencies I Can’t Forget

You moved through rooms like language I almost knew
soft syllables and shadow.
When you left, the air kept
folding around your absence,
as if to remember the weight of you.
I count the hums in your silence
fluorescent lights, refrigerator song
the world’s small insistences
that sound like your patience.
There is no Ursula, only the signal
still crossing my skin:
hands that steadied mine in the blur,
voice tuned to a lower sky.
I keep your name in my mouth
like static before speech,
a shape I return to
when the words won’t come.
I line up my offerings
the marbles, the keys, the glass stars
each one a different way
to say I remember.
The night listens,
so I speak in patterns,
in the rhythm that once reached you
not prayer, not plea,
but the way sound becomes touch
when someone is willing to hear.
I am still the quiet
you taught me to survive.
And still, I listen for you
in every flicker of light.

Carrie Farrar is an autistic poet and early-childhood educator based in Woodland Hills, California. Her work explores neurodivergence, devotion, and the physics of intimacy. Her poems have appeared in Vast Chasm Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Spectrum Magazine, The Art of Autism, and Poetry for Mental Health (Barratt Press).