In your wake,
In your silence,
a subtle soundtrack
swarms my head.

The melody of beeping monitors,
The rhythm of knuckles on bed rails,
And the verses, pitched in pain.

They only grow louder, still.

But, grabbing at the void
for any last sound of you,
I hear the wind rushing by
as the world just keeps turning,
I hear the cackling of atoms
that never stopped their motion,
I hear the grass strands
rudely displacing your plot’s dirt,
And reality itself popping
as it rips apart at the seams.

Truth is, I thought I’d feel silent without you,
But it’s grown louder, still.

I wrote a letter to an old poet.
The paper: stained,
the pen: dry.
Then “Time stopped,” as the poet would say,
and often I find myself convinced by the claim.

I stare at the parchment,
at a loss for what to write—
letters jumbled
into half-made sentences,
with words that have no provenance.

It was moonlight when I started.
Now it’s day, and I stare
out the window.
I realize now—it was love we shared.
But the poet I knew is long gone.
His voice: an echo in my mind.
His poems—nothing but a mere song of his thoughts.
Words
that then were just momentary.

I recall him sitting in this very place,
writing until his pen
spilled ink all over the desk.
My gaze lingers on the stains that remain—
even the table can’t forget his trace.

I try to find it in myself
to forget him,
to forgive him
for tangling me in his mess.
To dust off the remains of his presence.

I find myself staring at the parchment once more,
and for the first time, I realize he had cursed me—
leaving me with his poetry behind.
Now all I write is but a shadow of him,
his voice stuck in the back of my mind.
And perhaps that was the cruelest thing he had done:
leaving me to bleed on parchment,
to be a mere trace—to fade.

to spend the rest of my life missing you

You don’t notice it at first.
Not really.
Life keeps you busy with noise, with dreams, with the next thing.

But then one day,
you cross an invisible threshold.
There’s no signpost, no celebration
just the quiet erosion of what once mattered.

The body falters first.
Not dramatically - no, it’s more insidious than that.
You wake up sore from sleep.
You get winded climbing stairs you once ran.
You start measuring your days in energy, not hours.

Then come the dreams
the ones you clung to like anchors.
They begin to dissolve.
Some shrink into hobbies, others vanish with a sigh.
And the ones that remain?
Too fragile to chase, too old to birth.

Your beliefs shift too.
Not because they were wrong,
but because the world keeps insisting you make room for things
you once swore you’d never tolerate.

You adjust.
You settle.
You survive.

But the worst part
the part no one warns you about
is the people.

One by one,
they begin to leave.

Some give you time.
They let you prepare your goodbye.
Others vanish mid-conversation,
leaving cups half full and promises unfinished.

And what’s cruel is not just that they’re gone
it’s that nothing fills their space.
You try.
You pretend.
You build new connections like patchwork quilts.
But nothing fits quite right.

Because love, real love, isn’t replaced.
It’s carried
as ache,
as memory,
as absence you learn to walk around like a piece of furniture in the dark.

You keep going, of course.
What else can you do?
You make tea.
You water the plants.
You smile at strangers and nod at the sky like it still owes you something.

But deep down, you know:
This is what it means to age
not the wrinkles, not the gray.
It’s the slow, silent disappearing
of everything that once made you feel
alive.

I never forgave my twin brother
for abandoning me
for six minutes in our mother’s womb,
leaving me there alone,
terrified in the dark,
floating like an astronaut in that silent space,
while kisses rained down on him from the other side.

Those were the longest six minutes of my life
the minutes that made him the firstborn,
the favored one.

Ever since, I raced to be first:
out of the room,
out of the house,
to school,
to the cinema
even if it meant missing the end of the movie.

Then one day, I got distracted,
and he stepped out to the street before me.
Smiling that gentle smile,
he was struck by a car.

I remember my mother
how she rushed from the house
at the sound of the impact,
how she passed by me,
arms outstretched toward his lifeless body,
but she screamed my name.

To this day,
I’ve never corrected her mistake.

It was I who died,
and he who lived.

I’ll give you my heart
Even if I don’t have yours

It’s good to sacrifice for the ones you love
Please be careful with it

It’s fragile
Really really fragile

And every minute you spend mad
It cracks exponentially

We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes as the sun rose.
We spoke in philosophical rhymes, unaware of the passage of time.
I realize now that the love we had is lost.
You reach for me, but I am a phantom. Long ago, I stopped reaching back.
Still, what we had—the raw and unearthly attraction, the bond forged between our two souls—is unlike anything I’ve ever known.
I will be alone until love strikes my heart like it once did.
I want a love that burns me to ash and then resurrects itself from the remnants.
I want a love that bleeds, gives, and never makes me question my worth.
If I can’t have that, I am content with nothing at all.

-Rhia Clay

She undressed in the mirror.
Only the reflection watched.
I found her candle,
cold and forgotten.

Her hands moved like smoke
understanding how to be skin again.
Not performance. Not pleasure.
Just unlearning the habit of vanishing.

Her shadow held her shape
longer than I did.
She said: “Stay,
but forget.”

Her child slept,
four states and a foster name away.
She traced a name in steam,
the S curling like turning in sleep.
then let it melt under a kiss.

There was a song
caught in the ceiling,
something we never played
but always meant to.

I kissed her hair while it was still hair
and not a question
left behind on a pillow.

I opened the door,
it sang some other man’s name.
A line drawn, erased. No message left.
The room forgot its language.
My ghost obeyed
and lifted.