No one will wait anymore—
Here, this silence hums its lonely hymn.
If anyone on this earth remembers the path you once took,
If anyone still hears the echo of the door you closed,
If anyone had stood beside you in that relentless rain—
That rain from a season long forgotten—
Will they return to find you here once more?

On the verandah, where evening moths swarm the fading light,
Or inside, as they reach for a half-forgotten tune—
When the fragile thread of melody suddenly snaps—
A withered petal will tremble, then fall,
Unraveling from their grasp like memory itself.

Once, I built a sanctuary for you,
stone by stone,
with the mortar of trust and the glass of faith.
I lit candles in your name,
believing your presence was holy,
believing your words were pure.

But shadows crept through the arches,
their whispers wearing your voice.
The stained glass splintered,
colors bleeding into the dirt,
saints crumbling into faceless dust.
The altar cracked beneath the weight of falsehood,
and I was left kneeling in ruins,
hands empty, prayers unanswered.

False friends do not storm the gates;
they enter quietly,
draped in the robes of devotion.
Their smiles are soft as velvet,
their promises gilded like scripture,
yet beneath it all
they carry the silence of betrayal.

You were not my enemy.
You were worse,
the ghost in the choir,
the hollow echo in the hymn.
Your absence began long before you left,
your faithlessness written in secret ink
between the lines of every vow.

Now I wander the cathedral of memory,
its pews lined with ashes,
its windows nothing but jagged teeth of glass.
The incense of grief still lingers,
smoke that curls around my lungs,
a perfume of what was lost.

I mourn not only you,
but the version of myself who believed
the childlike trust,
the faith untested,
the hope that friendship was sacred.
All of it lies entombed here,
buried beneath stone and silence.

And yet
even in this hollowed ruin,
I light one candle.
Not for you,
never for you,
but for the lesson carved into bone:
that trust, once shattered,
does not resurrect.
That faith, once broken,
becomes a haunting.

The cathedral stands,
but it is no longer holy.
It is a mausoleum of what I gave,
what I lost,
and what can never return.

©️ Dark Water Diaries

boy who craves a darker shadow
not just shade, but hunger wrapped in smoke and bone,
under headlines wife’s sister’s affairs rot at the root.

hemlocked, nameless, hair knotted with cuscuta string;
ghost-vines rope his wrists like hungry knuckles.
the hollow-eyed boy carves a bar and calls it scripture,
trades green for powder, profit for blood;
he’d slit a throat before he spares a leaf.

how does that nameless leaf keep grieving?
how does it stay alive?
it roots in rot
it drinks their blood and keeps on green.
.