I kissed him goodbye,

knowing he wouldn’t remember me tomorrow,

and the ache of that truth tasted like copper on my tongue. A faint taste only halfway mine.


Not grief.

Just the sharpness that comes before it.

Not sorrow but the burning logs that fuel its pride.


His arms loosened around me the same way his mind did,

slowly, helplessly,

like he was trying to hold water with trembling hands. As if his eyes were the window to his soul and I was an invader.


He is,


a blur now.

A soft edged silhouette where a soul used to rest.

A name I’ve said so many times it has worn thin in my mouth,

frayed like fabric caught on the teeth of time.

Remaining in the remembrance of the eyes of memory.


Some days, I remember him by color,

the curve of his smile gold tinted,

the warmth of his voice dipped in hematite pulling to the silver blood adorning my lips.

Other days, he’s only a feeling,

that half second before recognition,

when your heart stutters as if it’s about to speak

but forgets the language.

And I don't forget.


He has lived inside me for lifetimes,

leaving fingerprints on my ribs

like press marks from dreams I can’t fully wake from.

A helpless causation refusing to bear effect.


I would trade every star in every sky

for one moment where he looks at me

and knows my name without reaching.


I hold myself together by instinct,

palms pressed to my own skin

as if by keeping my body whole

I can keep him from drifting away.


Synapse colored threads spiking through my skin, an assortment of hands once touched.


But he drifts.

He always drifts.

Just one river away, a train of thought apart.


I remember the versions of him

who loved me so infinitely it felt divined by fate,

who kissed me like memory itself was flammable, who said my name like it was a secret he was finally allowed to keep.


But that’s the cruelty of cycles,

the body remembers what the mind abandons.

And the soul forgets each and every time.


I whisper his name to the gods anyway,

to Dorionis, who crafted beginnings,

to Jadriel, who stitched time through marrow, and cried even still.


I ask them why they keep giving him back to the world without giving him back to me.

Why cruel games must play before me as archangels bearing blood of gold hold spears to thrones in my curious inquiries.


Why I must hold all the remembering

while he dissolves into forgetting.

Why must this library grow without stories of us.


Why must I hold his stories as if they do not include me.


When I look into my own eyes,

I see the bruise colored sadness

of being known for a heartbeat

and lost for an era.


He has died before.

He will die again.

And every time,

I am left with echoes so warm they hurt, so deep I mistake them for falling.


But he,


he stays rooted inside me,

like the aftertaste of a dream

as if architects lost sight of the foundation.


I see him everywhere,

in strangers habits,

in the way shadows fall caught by coarse grounds, in the sound of footsteps that nearly match his.


A familiar melody.

A dance I still know the steps to

even when the floor beneath me shifts and folds.


I live in the space between who I was

and who I am, half loved, half abandoned,

half reaching, half unraveling.

But entirely I am alone.


Time keeps reshaping us,

but my hunger for him stays the same,

not divine, nor epic,

a quiet kind of longing found in a space where sound cannot exist, it curls in the lungs and refuses to leave


Is it I who is a disciple of gluttony?

A servant of greed, a child of sloth who waits and wants until love finds me still.


When he reaches for me in confusion,

when his fingers grasp only air,

I feel something inside me crack,

a soft break, a silent one,

like the sound of a heart learning

it can be forgotten.


I want to gather him close

and remind him of every life we touched,

but memory is a goddess

who gives freely only to those she chooses.


And I am her.

Which makes it worse.


For what is more cruel than forgetting,

when my very divinity demands that nothing be lost?

And what is more ironic than love,

when the only way I may keep him

is by losing him in every moment that should have been ours?


What cruelty surpasses forgetting,

when all I have left of him lives only in the before?


So I wrap the heaviness around my shoulders

like a shawl woven from all our almosts,

and I watch him fade again.


And when the last piece of me

slips from his mind,

when he can no longer recall my voice,

my laughter,

the warmth of my hands,


I let the break happen.


I let the pieces scatter

across every life we shared,

stardust kicked up by a passing god.


And I kiss him goodbye.


And in the shattering, I see the truth.


I was never just a girl.


I was the archive.

The witness.

The keeper of everything we were

and everything we failed to say.


What is loving if not bearing witness,

and what is more cruel then to forget?


I was the sliver of light learning

how to love something made of impermanence.

A shadow of self hatred learning to rely on passing reflections for beauty to be held.


And as he disappears from the world once more,I remain, a whisper in the dark,

a shadow on the edge of his dreams,

a guardian of every version of us.


I am the keeper of memory,

of love threaded through lifetimes.



Again and again the rivers of fate bring you to my shores


and still, my love,


I would let the sea turn bare, I'd burn through all of eternity

just to be yours

in one.