You didn't leave so much as
disappear –
no door, no argument, no
final word to turn over in my hands.
Just the slow realization
that the silence had become permanent,
that I was speaking
into a room that no longer existed.
And then, worse:
the story arrived without me in it.
A new version, clean and resolved,
in which I was the reason,
the shadow, the thing
she had to escape.
I have spent nights
trying to find myself in her telling –
looking for the man she described
in the mirror, in the record,
in the faces of people who knew us –
and finding instead only
the bewildering gap
between what I lived
and what was said.
This is the second loss,
the one no one warns you of:
not just her absence
but the theft of the ground
you were standing on.
To love someone is to hand them
a pen.
Most people write with care.
Some rewrite everything.
And you are left
holding the original –
the only copy,
the one that will never
be believed.