The Ghost of Us
A poem
I felt you
before you arrived,
a shiver along the hollow of my spine,
your hands brushing the corners of my mind
like moth wings caught in the light
but never burned.
We stood silent,
this trembling ground between us
a barrier of breath.
Love hung suspended,
a word without weight,
and I wondered —
how can something so heavy
drift through air like dust
and settle in the cracks of our skin?
There’s no room
in the chest for both blood and flame —
yet you made a space
in my bones,
carved your name into marrow.
I carry it now,
this ache,
this pulse of you
beating against my ribs
with each breath
that still smells like your leaving.
You were never mine
but I loved you fiercely,
in the way a cliff loves the sea,
holding firm while you chipped away
each sharp edge I had built
to keep the world at bay.
You flooded the crevices
with your salt,
washed me clean
until I no longer recognized
the shape of my own sorrow.
Love, they say,
is a violent thing —
and I have been torn open by its hands,
battered and reborn
with each glance,
each kiss that lingers too long
like a bruise
I keep pressing.
Your touch
remains —
a stain I can’t wash out,
no matter how many nights
I scrub my skin raw
in an attempt to feel whole again.
I tried to explain it once,
this hollowness that remains
where you filled me —
but the words turned to ash
in my mouth,
each syllable a ghost of its meaning,
each pause a betrayal
of the language I used to know.
We spoke in riddles,
you and I,
twisting meaning
until it broke.
I wear my love for you
like a shroud now,
threadbare and fraying at the seams,
and when the wind catches
it pulls me backward —
I stand in the memory of your arms
as if time were a thing I could hold,
as if your breath still warmed my neck
in the dark.
I have not learned
to unlove you,
though I have tried.
I stitch my heart back together each night,
but the thread is weak,
and every morning I wake
with another tear,
another unraveling of the parts of me
that were once whole
before you.
How strange,
this love that lingers long after the body is gone.
I find you
in the spaces between words,
in the pause before I speak,
and I wonder —
did you ever love me
with the same fierceness
that still burns my veins?
Your silence answers
more than your words ever could.
It is in the absence
that I find your truth —
the quiet devastation of an unspoken farewell,
the echo of your leaving
still bouncing off the walls
of the life we never built.
I loved you,
but that love was a phantom,
a thing too delicate to survive
in the harsh light of reality.
We were shadows,
you and I,
and when the sun rose
there was nothing left
but the empty space we used to fill.
I wonder now
what it would have been like
if you had stayed —
if we could have learned
to hold each other
without tearing at the seams,
to love without drowning
in the weight of our own expectations.
But I know the answer
as surely as I know
the sound of your name
still catches in my throat —
we were never meant
to last beyond the moment
we first touched.
And now,
all that remains
is the ghost of us
lingering in the air
like smoke.
I breathe it in,
and for a moment
it fills the emptiness
where you used to be.
But it fades,
as all things do,
and I am left
with nothing
but the echo of your touch
on my skin.
Still, I love you.
Even now.
Even here,
in the ruins of what we once were.
