The Hour the Sky Forgot Its Name

– a meditation on ruin, memory, and the quiet cruelty of beauty

I remember the precise moment the cathedral collapsed, not in brick or bone but in the breath of a woman pronouncing always with such gravity it rewrote the laws of time. The wind stopped. Birds forgot their migrations. I stood barefoot in a flooded field of ghost wheat, each stalk wincing under a silence too absolute for wind or weeping. The light fell unevenly, as though guilt had weight and was refracting through the hours. Somewhere nearby, a dog howled not for loss, but recognition. I knew then the world would never unbend.

I am a cartographer of absences. My hands recall the feel of doorframes no longer attached to houses, the heat of voices long since evaporated into their last syllables. Names don’t linger in my mouth – they blister. I collect things people leave behind in the rush to become someone new: the worn heels of shoes, single earrings in guttered streets, love letters half-burnt but fully abandoned. These are my geography, my creed. Each object a relic of a misremembered miracle.

There was a man once who told me that nothing sacred is ever loud. I think of him when thunder opens its mouth like a throat learning to scream. I think of him when a child presses a hand against a fogged window and draws something incomprehensible – an alphabet too young for comprehension but old enough to weep. He believed in quiet catastrophes. I carry that belief in my pocket like a match that never lights.

The moon tonight hangs like a verdict. Too full. Too pale. Too perfectly round to trust. It stares into the river, narcissistic and unchanged, as if memory were a flat surface we might wade through without drowning. But I know better. I once tried to bottle that river and sell it as nostalgia. People paid in teeth.

My house is made of questions no one asks twice. The walls hum with old music – broken metronomes keeping time for ghosts too tired to haunt. I sleep beside a window that shows me only what I’ve already lost. The stars blink like liars. And every morning, the sun rises like an apology I’m too proud to accept.

Somewhere deep beneath my ribs, I keep a locked drawer of unfinished sentences. When I die, bury me in the ellipsis. I want to leave the world the way it left me –

almost saying something.