I wrote about her
not out of love,
but out of need.
Need to trap a flicker of warmth
before it burned through me.

She wasn’t a girl,
she was the hush between verses.
Her voice moved like water over stone
soft, inevitable
the kind that shaped you before you realized you were eroding.

Her eyes
I once called them twin fawns by the stream.
I meant it.
That wild, startled beauty.
The kind that makes you lean forward,
thirsty,
but too reverent to touch.

Her absence folded me like linen
creased into every room I entered,
every silence I mistook for peace.

I called her the dawn that made the stars ashamed.
I meant that, too.
Light wasn’t light until it touched her skin.
Every metaphor I wrote tasted like rosewater and musk,
and every breath steeped in jasmine.

She never read them.
Or if she did
she stayed silent,
like she always did.

I gave her gold in my lines,
wrote her smile into the constellations,
made her my always,
my only.
She gave me nothing.
Not cruelty, just... distance.
She became the shadow I mistook for presence.

I wrote her again and again,
called her scripture,
called her the sun,
called her the one the rivers learned to dance for.

She never turned to look.

So I traced her ghost through metaphors.
I painted her into gardens I could walk through,
dreams I could survive inside.

Because if I couldn’t hold her
I’d hold the version I’d written.
The one who brushed my hair in twilight.
The one who said I was beautiful, even when I wasn’t.

I turned her into a myth.
She became a dawn that stayed.
A whisper that answered.

And I am
Still writing.
Still chasing
a girl who only exists
in poems she’ll never read.