If I Have To Linger

I hope when I’m gone

I don’t rattle chains or doors,

I hope I learn the language of dust

and quiet corners.

Let me haunt a bookstore—

the kind that smells like paper and time,

where spines curve like tired shoulders

and stories wait like unsent letters.

I’ll slip between the aisles at midnight,

a hush in the poetry section,

a breath of cold where the endings live,

where I never had enough time.

I’ll read the books I meant to read-

the ones I promised myself,

the ones that came out after I died

and never knew I was waiting.

No clocks, no closing time,

just ink and ghosts of sentences,

just me learning how every story ends

without worrying about mine.

And if a living hand reaches for the wrong book,

I’ll tip the right one to the floor,

like fate pretending it was an accident,

like love, still meddling.

If I have to linger,

let it be somewhere full of hope—

where even the dead believe

there’s always another chapter.