Wish you came!

I set two plates for dinner every night.

Yours goes cold.

Mine goes untouched.

We both starve, but only I notice.

I memorized the sound of your footsteps

So I could stop flinching

Every time the neighbor walks by.

It’s been three years. I still look up.

You exist in the past tense.

I exist in the waiting room of your life —

No appointment, no call-back,

Just magazines from 2019 and hope that expired.

I loved you so loudly it left me deaf.

Now the quiet sounds like your laughter

In rooms you’ve never entered.

I’ve gone deaf and haunted at the same time.

I don’t want you back.

I want the version of me

That didn’t know your name

To come home. But she moved out

The day you forgot my birthday.

So I’ll keep watering dead flowers

And calling it a garden.

Because if I stop,

Then it was all for nothing.

And I can’t afford for it to be nothing.

And I can’t afford for it to be nothing.

So I lie.

I tell the mirror you texted.

I tell my friends you’re busy.

I tell myself this is love, not madness.

I started sleeping on your side of the bed

So the cold would have company.

Now both sides are cold,

And I’ve learned how to shiver quietly

So the neighbors won’t worry.

I saw your name on a stranger’s coffee cup today.

Carried it home like a relic.

Drank it black. No sugar.

Pretended the bitterness was yours.

It was better than tasting nothing.

The worst part isn’t that you left.

It’s that you never arrived,

And I spent years introducing you to my mother

In my head. She loved you.

She asks about you sometimes.

I say you’re traveling.

I am the last person on earth

Still keeping your time zone.

3am for you is 3am for me now.

I wake up for ghosts

Who don’t even know they’re haunting me.

If love is a language, I am fluent

In a dialect that died with us —

“Us” being a word I invented

For a country with a population of one.

*The Bottom of the Candle*

If love is a language, I am fluent

In a dialect that died with us —

“Us” being a word I invented

For a country with a population of one.

And I am its only citizen,

Paying taxes in tears to a government of memory.

I built statues of you in every room.

Now I live in a museum of things you never touched.

I stopped checking my phone.

Started checking the obituaries instead —

Not for you.

For me.

To see if anyone noticed I went missing

The day you looked through me like glass.

I tried to give your ghost back.

Left it on doorsteps. Mailed it to old addresses.

But it keeps returning to sender,

Covered in red stamps that say

_NO ONE HERE BY THAT NAME._

I practice your eulogy in the shower

Because that’s where I do all my drowning now.

“Here lies the girl who loved too much,

Buried in a casket made of unsent texts.”

No one will come.

You taught me how to be a funeral with no guests.

The moon doesn’t ask why I’m still awake.

Even it knows:

Some loves don’t die.

They just learn how to rot prettier.

And the cruelest mercy?

If you walked in right now,

With flowers, with sorry, with _I was wrong_ —

I’d thank you.

And ask you to leave.

Because the me that wanted you

Died waiting.

And I’m still grieving her.

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