I Still Feel You

So deep is the place you left inside me,

not carved by time, but by presence,

a quiet wound that never learned how to heal,

only how to remember.

You once caressed the edges of my becoming,

soft as dawn touching a sleeping sea,

sweet in the way only moments that don’t last can be,

lovely in a way that made silence feel alive.

I was loved,

not in fragments, not in passing,

but in a way that made my name feel softer

when you said it.

And I believed it would stay that way,

that love, once spoken between two trembling hearts,

would learn how to survive the distance of days.

But not anymore.

Now the world moves differently without you in it,

as if even light forgot the shape of what we were.

What we had does not return when called.

It only echoes.

Still,

I still feel you.

In the quiet between thoughts.

In the spaces where my defenses fall asleep.

In the places I pretend are healed

but are only learning how to miss you more quietly.

You were sweet like a memory I didn’t know I would lose,

lovely like something the universe made once

and hesitated before letting go.

And even now, when I tell myself it is over,

that you are not here anymore,

that I should stop reaching for what no longer answers,

there is still a part of me

that turns toward your absence

like it is the light.

Searching for you.