November 11, 2018—One Day Later
I live in the memory of us
I don’t live in the world anymore.
Not really.
I live in the memory of us.
I wake in sheets that remember your weight,
breathe air that once held your laughter.
I walk through days like a ghost,
haunting the ruins of what we were.
I carry you in the quiet spaces between each breath,
in the hush right before the sky breaks.
You are the beating weight behind my ribs,
the ache in the silence when the world forgets your name.
I whisper you when the absence gets too loud.
When the echo of you claws through me
like waves against bone.
I start and end each day with your face,
Sometimes real,
Oftentimes conjured by a memory too stubborn to die.
Time has stopped passing for me, it stands still in my memories,
It loops—
a reel of golden hours
and the night you disappeared.
I carry you in the quiet between each breath,
a name I whisper when the absence of you
rips through the stillness like a wound reopening.
I live in the memories of our love,
I live in the memories that we have made,
I live in the world I thought I could have with you,
My hands still tremble for you,
still remember how your skin felt like safety.
My heart, it hasn’t beat the same since you left.
But it still races when the memory of us surfaces,
sudden, sharp, holy.
Like it remembers the shape of you
better than it remembers how to survive without you.
It aches for every flash of you,
Every glimpse—real or imagined.
And maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.
Maybe the only thing that’s real
is the dream I can’t wake from.
The hours echo.
Time, cruel and circular, repeats itself.
The blood still moves,
But my soul is stranded,
on that same beach where we began.
My existence is buried in every grain of sand that once held our love,
still salted by the ocean that carried us to each other.
I taste you in the wind,
in the surf, in the salt that once clung to your skin.
I see your eyes, clear as the first day,
when something inside me said,
That’s him.
That’s the man I’d give anything to.
Everything I am.
Everything I could ever be.
And even now,
with distance between us like a wound that never heals,
I reach.
Across countries, oceans, years.
I reach with shaking hands and an open heart,
trying to catch the scent of you
in the wind that still dares to touch my skin.
Because I live in the memory of us.
And sometimes,
it’s the only place
I still feel alive.
The distance is here now,
wide as oceans,
and I reach for you still.
With every gust of wind against my skin,
I search for the scent of you.
And sometimes—
if I breathe deep enough—
You return.