The past does not fade,
it waits, silent,
like a shadow clinging to the edges of my skin,
a ghost that never stops whispering.
I open my eyes in the present,
and there it is again,
the same ache,
the same weight,
wearing a different face,
but cutting me with the same sharp edges.

It is not the same, I tell myself,
but my heart cannot be convinced.
This hurt feels heavier,
as though today’s sorrow has reached backward
with cruel fingers,
digging into scars I thought had healed,
peeling them open
until the past and present bleed together.

It becomes a two-headed monster,
yesterday and today fused,
one clawed hand clutching my memories,
the other raking at my chest,
leaving me gasping,
unsure where one wound ends
and the next begins.

My sadness is no longer a passing storm,
it is a tide that never recedes.
It drags me into its undertow,
pulling me farther and farther
from the shore of myself.
I sink into the silence,
my lungs burning,
my body heavy,
my heart weighted with stones
I never chose to carry.

I cannot tell if this is punishment,
or simply the cruelty of time,
to circle me back again and again
to the very place I broke.
Every cycle cuts deeper,
like the clock’s hand is a blade
spinning over my skin,
reopening what never had a chance to close.

There are no words vast enough
to contain this grief.
It is an ocean without horizon,
a cavern without floor.
It echoes through me
until even my bones ache with its sound.
I fall into the silence of it,
a silence too loud,
a silence that devours every attempt to speak.

And still, each morning,
I open my eyes to the same repetition,
a loop I never asked to live inside,
a cruel reminder
that sometimes the deepest pain
is not in the past at all,
but in the way the present
reaches back and ties me
to everything I could not escape.