The City You Took With You

The City You Took With You

When you left, I learned a terrible truth:

You were never one. You were a nation.

A breathing city with a thousand rooms,

Cathedrals of laughter, alleys of silence,

And I — a lone citizen , stood in your square

The day the empire moved away.

The walls remain. The doors still swing.

But every brick now recites your name

In a language only grief can speak.

The clock still marches, silver-footed, proud,

Yet time itself lies buried in these halls

A kingdom without its king.

Distance is the oldest liar.

It swore to separate us.

Instead, it carved you deeper into me.

You are in the weight of my coffee cup,

In the pause before I answer a question,

In the way I fold your absence into my coat

Before stepping into winter.

I perform the rituals of the living:

Inhale. Exhale. Smile on cue.

Applause for the actor who plays “alive.”

But every breath is counterfeit currency,

Borrowed from vaults of the dead

Who understand this bankruptcy of soul.

You did not slam the door.

No thunder. No broken sky.

You left with the grace of falling snow

Silent, absolute, final.

And yet, when your shadow crossed the threshold,

It pulled the whole house through with it.

You evicted me from my own life.

The lamps still burn, stubborn, small defiance

But their light is a museum piece now:

Exhibit A: How brightness looked before you.

I stand in rooms full of people,

Their laughter a foreign weather system,

While I pan for gold in the river of my chest,

Searching for the self that left with you.

Life will continue. That’s the cruel contract.

Days will file past like prisoners in gray.

Each hour will be a locked room where fear

Sits in the corner, weaving shrouds from silence.

My lips will learn the choreography of joy.

My eyes will not.

Here is the paradox that breaks me open:

Your absence built an altar in my blood.

You vanished from my sight,

And moved into my bones.

Every night, darkness wears your face.

You are the ghost that haunts the house

By becoming the house.

Then grief grew teeth.

It learned to speak in my voice.

It grew so vast, so articulate,

That even tears filed for retirement

Exhausted by the ocean they had to cross.

Until one evening, the color of old knives,

My heart committed its only betrayal.

Not with new love. Not with forgetting.

But with silence.

Your name, once a prayer, a password, a pulse

Died on my tongue from disuse.

And in that moment, I understood:

Love does not perish in the leaving.

It does not die in the screaming or the breaking.

Love dies quietly,

On the day we run out of elegies.

It dies the day we cease to cry,

And call it healing.