I carried us in silences, heavy and hollow,
Eight years of maybes, almosts, and aching hours.
Your laughter was a light I hoarded,
A sunbeam I'd cage, then shy away from.
I carried you like dusk in my veins,
a quiet fire, restless in its ache.
Eight years of words left unfinished,
shadows of what we dared not name.
I loved you, fiercely, in the shadows,
But never enough to stand in the sun.
You wanted all—that reckless unraveling—
While I stayed tethered to my trembling fear.
You were sunlight I could not hold,
a melody my hands dropped halfway,
tangled in the thorns of myself.
Your voice, still lingering, a ghost-song.
Your name, a stone thrown into my chest,
Ripples of longing breaking the brittle calm.
Eight months without your voice,
And I still hear it in the spaces I avoid.
I learned to smile with fractured teeth,
to nod through the weight of my breaking.
Your family laughed with mine, unaware,
of the chasm between silence and almost.
You were brighter than my fractured beginnings,
Your kindness, an impossible cathedral I couldn't enter.
I thought love was for someone braver,
Not for a spoon-fed shadow of despair.
You wanted fullness, to cross the line,
but I shrank, bound to my trembling.
Fear wore my skin like a cruel lover,
whispered lies of undeserving and hollow.
You were so near, and I fled—
Always closer to ghosts than to gold.
I gave you a miser's offering,
Friendship wrapped in the writhing of what-ifs,
Eight months now, I feel your absence,
a wound that mocks its own healing.
You wanted the sky; I crawled the soil,
dragging my own shadow beneath me.
And now you want all or nothing at all.
I miss what we blurred—what I broke.
Your absence gnaws at the ribbons of me,
An echo of everything I didn't dare to hold.
I miss you like a half-heard prayer,
a cry that dissolves in midnight air.
But fear is quicksand, and I still sink,
your name drowning with me, unanswered.
I want the world, or nothing,
but my hands shake—they always do.
If ever I believed in vows,
it would be your name, not another.
Faithless, yet you’re my religion,
burning in the hollow of me.
Know this: my fear was the wall,
but my love, it was always you.
~A Josie☆
