I did not choose you,
as the river does not choose its stone,
and yet your name was carved into the water
long before I learned how to speak.
You moved through my life
like the shadow of something already lost,
a scent that lingers on hands
never meant to touch.
I tried to walk away—
I packed silence in my mouth
like a fist of sand—
but you live in the corners of my thoughts
where even memory dares not go.
Fate, cruel seamstress,
threaded us together with longing
but stitched the world
so we would always be
an arm’s length apart.
We are a poem with one line erased,
a song sung to the wrong sky.
No matter how I call,
your name vanishes into the throat of time.
I have kissed strangers
hoping they would taste like your absence,
and held bodies
that melted in the fire
of a heart still bound to you.
But the night knows.
The moon, silver witness,
has seen how I carry you—
not in my hands
but in my blood.
You are the ache
beneath every joy,
the pause in every laugh,
the quiet when music ends.
I rage against the heavens,
curse the crooked stars
that aligned only to mock us.
Didn’t we burn enough
to earn a moment of peace?
But the truth is not kind.
It does not bend for love.
It does not soften
when we scream into the wind.
And so I wait,
not for your return—
I am no fool—
but for the day I can forget
how it felt
to be half of something whole.
Still, you haunt the spaces
between sleep and waking,
and every time I breathe,
I wonder if the air
once passed through your lips.
This is the cruelest devotion:
to love someone
not across distance
but across destiny—
to hold on
even as the world
lets go.
And I do.
I hold.
Because letting go
would be to admit
that love
was not enough.
Broken Author 