Jagged Mosaic

She is the room I used to live in

but the keys no longer fit in the locks.

I see her in old video tapes—

the easy conversation, lips that didn't

have to calculate words before saying them aloud.

She skated across the thinnest of ice

as if it couldn't crack beneath her.

The loss didn't happen in a scream

but eroded in the years that followed

that

one

night.

I find her ghost in the most mundane of places.

In grocery aisles of food I no longer eat,

In my closet of clothes that feel like they belong to someone else,

And in songs I used to dance to.

She is a language that

I used to speak fluently

And now

I can only barely translate

with a thick, stumbling accent.

I mourn the way she trusted the air she breathed

and the ground to stay beneath her feet.

We've become a jagged mosaic.

The sharp, broken pieces of her

Bound together

By hopeless glue

To reshape me.

But light leaks through the gaps instead.