once
there existed a corridor
between two minds,
no doors, only thresholds
a shared fluency in unsaid things,
a grammar of glances,
a communion of shadows cast at the same angle
we were a structure
not built but grown,
half-myth, half-mapping error
an atlas scrawled in the margins
of late-night hunger and
the sacred boredom of staying
you were a season
misfiled in the calendar,
all golden hour and static
spilling into places
you had no business being
and I was the weather
you never checked twice
you unspooled without rupture,
no violence, no salt
just drift
an event horizon in reverse
where the light still seemed to arrive
but the source was long gone
and I,
left orbiting an absence
like a moon circling a planet
that blinked out mid-century,
became fluent in substitutions
smiling where I used to answer,
nodding in frequencies
only static returns
this isn’t heartbreak
this is un-language
this is time folding wrong
this is the godless grief reserved
for those whose fingerprints
once pressed meaning
into the very walls of your cognition
you were not a chapter
you were the ink margin-bled,
a spectral annotation
in the manuscript of a self
I’m no longer sure I authored
sometimes
I find you in the topography
of fading weather,
in shadows that fall
at impossible angles,
in conversations
never held
but remembered
I mistake my memory of you
for a myth I participated in
a dream flickering on 35mm
in a collapsing theatre
where I am the only audience,
and the projector stutters
but keeps going
I still speak to you
in half-syllables
in abstract humidity
in rooms that forgot
how to echo back
your absence –
a knife made of fog
harmless
until it isn’t
how do you eulogize
a silence that wasn’t always there
but became permanent
without a vote?
no obituary for erosion
no candle for evaporation
no theology for slow forgetting
grief, in this form,
is not a wound
it is a redacted text
still carried,
still recited,
but now missing
its essential verb
nostalgia is a liar,
but a gentle one,
and some nights
I let her say
you are still
watching
just beyond the frame
and if I remember slow enough
I might find the version of us
that didn’t forget
how to stay
entropy doesn’t care
about intimacy
or timing
or the slight way
you used to tilt your head
when understanding arrived
and so I become
cartographer of vanished things,
archivist of spectral geographies,
scholar of shared silences
whose co-author
forgot the language
mid-sentence
I still speak it
alone
as ritual
as defiance
as echo
not hoping for return
but refusing to unremember
the hemisphere
we once
inhabited
together
