I press my hands
to the shadow of you,
counting the quiet
between your breaths.

you are still here
but the air
already aches
like absence

as if I'm
cradling
your ghost,
begging it to stay.

I orbit the day
like a dead star,
lightless,
remembering fire.

Grief is a slow eclipse
vanishing
by degrees.

Still, drifting forward,
trailing the dust
of what is lost.

The cosmos turns away
and the silence grieves alone.

I mistook
the shimmer of leaving
for love,
and bled stars
each time a name vanished
into the sky.

The universe does not mourn
its falling things,
neither should I.

But my body still weeps
like it forgot
we are made of the same dust
that disappears.

The dark drinks me
like spilled ink on snow,
each breath
a vanishing.

Grief without origin,
hollow without end,
a wound that wakes
with no memories
of why it bleeds.

I wear longing
like a second skin
soft to the eye,
raw underneath.

I am untethered.

Love’s ghost
skirts my edges
never landing,
leaving only the ache
of being less
than nothing to hold.

You smiled,
and suddenly,
the night bloomed
softly
as if the stars
had always been flowers.

My skull is a lantern
cracked with light
too full of flickering things
to ever go dark.

Thought drips like candlewax,
pooling in the hollows,
soft and searing,
never still.

I am sinking
into a hush that gnaws,
a lullaby sung with teeth.