She sketched the quiet,
with charcoal shadows and haunting trees,
bending to winds that whispered lies,
calling, but never her name.

Wildflowers leaned in defiance,
toward a light she could not feel,
children’s laughter, untamed rivers,
while hers unraveled into dust.

An old soul, they said,
drifting through doors left ajar,
a wanderer in borrowed lives,
but always a stranger,
always a ghost.

She craved the world,
its wild crescendos, its burning skies,
but the edges cut too deep.
Her hands, blistered from endless reaching,
held truths too sharp to release.
The rain came and kissed the earth,
but her skin held the stains,
red as warnings,
swollen like secrets buried alive.

The bruises healed but lingered,
etched on the walls of her mind,
like shadows curling tight
around a room with no escape.

She tasted love once,
a fleeting hymn in a cathedral of storms,
a breath of warmth on frostbitten lips.
He devoured the letters she wrote,
exhaling truths that burned through her chest.

No one knew the weight she bore,
the silence stitched across her ribs,
like velvet sewn with broken glass.
She wrote, she spun fragile threads of light,
a tapestry too beautiful to wear,
her soul adrift in a realm
untouched by what she could not name.

In the end, she lived
in the spaces between,
between the screams,
between the quiet,
between the words
she dared not sing.