I draw maps on the inside of my skin,
inked in the color of vanishing.
Here lies the boundary of what was ours,
eroded by the tide of unspoken.
The compass spins, untethered,
its needle trembling toward absence.
Do you hear the silence?
It is not quiet—
it claws at the air,
each gasp a hymn to what’s been torn.
The walls hum with the echoes of us,
a dissonant symphony,
the architecture of breaking.
You left your shadow folded neatly,
tucked in the corner of my ribcage.
I wear it like a second heart,
beating out of time,
a phantom rhythm that sways
to the cadence of your departure.
The sky is a wound tonight,
its dark edges stitched with stars,
each pinprick of light
a question I can’t stop asking.
The moon doesn’t answer,
its face turned away,
familiar as grief, distant as god.
And what of the map I made for you?
You’ve burned it—
I smell the ashes in my dreams,
see the charred remains in the curve of my palm.
Still, my fingers trace the routes,
as if I might find you
in the spaces between now and never,
as if I might follow the lines
to the horizon where
You
and this world
could have coexisted.
What does the compass measure when the poles themselves have shifted?
