I see you in the space between streetlights,
where the wind tastes like October
and the leaves whisper your name.
I told myself I wouldn’t go back there,
but memory is a cruel, old house—
doors always open, floorboards aching.

You left your sweater in my closet,
a ghost I never learned to bury.
I wear it when the air gets cold,
pretending it still smells like you,
pretending I don’t feel like the house we built
has been condemned.

It’s funny how we used to love the fall,
how we swore we’d never be like them,
the people who left when things got hard,
the people who stopped saying goodnight.
And now, I walk past strangers
wearing your face in their shadows,
and you, somewhere,
are learning how to love without me.

I don’t know what’s scarier—
the ghosts, or the fact
that I let myself become one.

I came on silver wings,
drifting past dying stars,
hoping to find a world soft enough
to call my own.

I saw blue first,
a planet breathing,
wrapped in mist and promise.
I thought, maybe here—
maybe here I could stay.

But then—
the silence of women swallowed whole,
voices drowned in laws not their own.
Skin held as a currency,
love twisted into a crime.
The ones in power, chosen by fear,
speak with empty mouths
and call it truth.

I watched men sharpen their edges
on the backs of women,
their laughter carving scars,
their hands taking without asking.

The food—
not food at all, but ghosts of what once was,
pumped with things that do not belong.
The trees fall,
not from time,
but from greed’s impatient hands.

And I wonder,
do they not see the world turning brittle?
Do they not hear the earth gasping?

I do not understand your wars,
your hunger for more,
the way you cage each other
and call it freedom.

I only feel it—
the ache of something wrong,
an unraveling, a sickness,
a grief I do not have a name for.

I did not come to be a witness
to a planet choosing its own end.
I came looking for home,
but this—
this is not a place to stay.

So I turn away,
silver wings catching starlight,
searching for a world
that remembers how to be kind.

i’m standing at the edge,
but it’s not the fall
i’m thinking about.

it’s the emptiness
that calls to me—
soft, persistent,
a shadow whispering
i’m not enough here.

it’s not wanting to die,
just wanting to know
what it would feel like
to be somewhere
without this weight.

maybe i just want to
know what it’s like
to stand there
& not feel
so lost.

i read the words
& they make sense—
but only to everyone else.

i sit in silence,
too afraid to ask,
too tired to keep pretending
that i understand.
maybe i’m not supposed to.
maybe i’m not meant to
know all the things
they do.

so i keep quiet,
wondering if i’m
even allowed to stay.