She is still here,
which is the strangest part.
Not in the ways I wanted –
not at the door, not in the morning,
not with any of the ordinary
mercies of return –
but in the cup I still don't use,
the sentence I begin and stop,
the dream that hands her back to me
warm and unrevised,
before I wake
and remember
what she made of me.
A ghost is not an absence.
It is a presence
that refuses to become the past.
I loved her with the kind of love
that believed in its own facts –
in the record of small kindnesses,
in the look she gave me once
across an ordinary room
as if I were something
worth the looking.
She took that too, when she left.
Rewrote it into evidence
of something darker.
Left me holding a feeling
that had been renamed
without my consent.
And so I live with her ghost –
not the her that left,
but the her I knew,
or thought I knew,
or built from everything
she let me see –
haunted not by what she was
but by the question
she made of me:
whether any of it
was ever
real.
The cruellest ghosts aren't the ones who stay.
They're the ones who make you doubt
the life you lived together.
But the hardest ghosts to bear
are the ones who still breathe
elsewhere.