to the darkest crevices we all escape from each day,
clawing out, forgetting, or pretending we do
but some never leave. some linger, ghosts curled
in the marrow of regret, faces melted in the echo
of a yesterday too slow, too weak, too nothing.
it was just a second, a breath, a misstep.
a hand not raised. a word unsaid. a smile swallowed.
and that was enough to cast them away,
stitched into shadows, never spoken aloud.

regret is for the living, for those who still wake
to the hush of streetlights trembling at dawn,
who still bite into the sinew of silence
and call it survival. but the forgotten—
they are not given the mercy of regret.
only the weight of a void carved in memory’s ribs,
only the nothingness that replaces a name,
a voice, a need, a gasp lost in the static
of the world’s unseeing, unhearing hum.

to be unseen is to die while breathing.
to reach and never touch is to burn without flame.
and so they are left there, bone-thin whispers,
entombed in dim-lit corridors of almost-love,
of almost-worth, of almost-enough.
no matter how hard the blind scream,
their voices dissolve like morning frost—
thin, fleeting, never enough to shatter
the glass of a world that never saw them.

but listen.

listen to the dark, to the echoes that pulse
like heartbeats beneath the cracks of time.
they are still there. still waiting. still asking
if not to be saved, then simply to be seen.