At least the names will always stay,
etched in ink, unchanged, unchanged.
No tide of time, no drift, no day
will shift the echoes once arranged.

They rest within my contracts sealed,
bound to the moments that we knew—
not to the faces time revealed,
but to the souls I journeyed through.

For who they were is who remains,
not who they grew to be, afar.
The past is carved in steady names,
not scattered by the shifting stars.

Try living in paradise

Still recovering from trauma

Thinking about the ones left behind



Feeling sun on brown skin

While buildings burn down

Today was like any other



Enjoying cool ocean waters

While salt washes festering wounds

Fresh flesh like grapefruit is pink



Looking to the distant stars

Trampling on growing daisies

Only to lay in a field of them



Howling loud at worship

While fearing the whites of saved eyes

Lift every voice and sing



To dance and to be joyful

While quakes lulls sleeping babies

When the dust settles what remains

She lived in my inbox,  
a constant pulse of memes and midnight thoughts,  
fragments of her days in a city I’d never walked
a movie recommendation
a reminder to sleep early
a nudge to wake up and try again.  

Even from miles away
she found a way to stay close
weaving herself into my new routine
as if distance was just another setting
to adjust.  

Her life moved forward in photos and captions
shared glimpses of places I could only picture
I watched, I listened, I responded  
but slowly, the messages thinned,  
the spaces between them stretching wider
until silence settled where she used to be.  

Yet
even now,
some nights I still hear her voice in my head:  
“Go to sleep early”  
as if she’s still looking out for me
somewhere beyond the screen.

Red for economics,  
green for English,  
white for ICT
your files stacked in my hands,  
pages filled with notes in your careful script
I never needed to ask; you just lent them
as if sharing knowledge meant sharing a part of you. 

A classroom of seventeen,  
but I only counted one.
I traced your desk with my fingertips,  
opened your pencil case just to see  
what colors you carried,  
what secrets lived between the erasers and sharpies.  

We worked in groups,  
side by side but never quite close enough.  
I stole glances when I thought you wouldn’t notice,  
but maybe you always did.  
Maybe that’s why you smiled so easily,  
why you never pulled away.  

Years have stretched between us,  
but high school still lingers like a cozy
dream  
I wake from too slowly.  
Your files, your laughter, your presence in the last row
they live in me
as if time forgot to take them when it took you.

I remember the rain, heavy on our umbrellas,  
the scent of wet earth as we walked,  
silent, yet knowing.  
You handed me the slippers first,  
a small kindness that opened a password door in my heart.  

In our classroom filled with murmurs and pages turning,  
you sat in the last row,  
your glasses catching the fluorescent light and time,  
your hairband keeping time with your movements
You were a tomboy, you said,  
but to me, you were softer than the world allowed.

A quiet building, an empty hallway,  
fries shared between words that meant everything and nothing
The pull of something unspoken  
led us up the stairs, past the classrooms where fans hummed  
to a moment that rewrote us.  

Afterward, we laughed in daylight,  
separate yet tangled,  
our conversations shifting between equations and longing.  
You had friends; I had you in the quiet.  
And then time carried us away,  
first to different cities, then to different lives.  

You reappeared in pixels and midnight messages,  
a voice from the past steadying me in my new world
But distance is a slow tide,  
pulling even the strongest memories apart
I spoke too much, stupidly shared too much, or maybe just enough,  
and you drifted again,  
this time with no promise of return.  

Now, I hold you in flashes
the rain, the fries, the hush of a stairwell,  
the echo of a name I can no longer address.

I scrolled through my camera roll. Here’s a photo from five years ago, it’s still fresh in the mind. In it were canola fields and a glittering wind. I could still feel the breeze lingering on my fingertips. It was me and a camera I no longer own, my dad, who, in his impatience, still drove me out to a field, outside city lines, so that I could take a photo of the sunset, for a class. There are some simple things, simple pictures. No person, or place of any significance, but they sit on you, right on your chest. They weigh heavy. I wonder why. Background set. Now I will look and feel the touch of yesterday. Swallowing every color in the picture and letting its sounds ring in my ear. I wonder why. No person or place of significance, but it sits on me, right on my chest.

thank god for the dead memory.
thank god, that it died while it was still good.
thank god, that it still resembles something i might’ve prayed for.

thank god, that i prayed for the death i didn’t know.
thank god, that my tears couldn’t well up
for the spring on the other side of your death’s door.
thank god, yours was the first rain that taught me
what umbrellas were.

thank god, that thanking god is such an empty phrase.
thank god, that it won’t grant you afterlife praise.
thank god, you’re now only a picture on a wall.
thank god, the effigies i bear in mind cannot be canonized,
for the things they’ve never done,
and the people they never were.

history invents the art of crying
writing its darkness manifesto
when the tear is hidden
the path follows a forced destiny.
what is there, to be found inside ourselves
something is looking at us
tribulations of mirage, the hazard of necessity
the word, the gun, the bone -
the threads of the revelation of time
sometimes history flows backwards
and my skull hurts like a broken umbrella
we taste the past, an obsessive memory
future, this Terra incognita, casts a muddy light
what is there to be found in the history of bones?