The Mind Remembers

Thoughts of you
arrive uninvited,
slipping through the cracks
of days I believed were finally my own.

You exist
where you no longer belong,

in the quiet,
in the spaces between conversations,
in songs,
in silence,
in every version of tomorrow
I never meant to imagine.

If someone could read my mind,
they would mistake it for devotion.

It isn't.

It's a prison
built from memories
I never asked to keep.

How is it possible

that after all this time,
my heart still reaches for you
before it remembers
it isn't supposed to?

I tried.

I tried to bury you
beneath new places,
new faces,
new beginnings.

Still,
you return.

Like a melody
I never chose
but somehow know by heart.

Like a ghost
that doesn't haunt my house,

only my thoughts.

You are everywhere
without being anywhere.

And that is the cruelest part.

Not that you're gone.

But that you never seem to leave.

Your absence fades.

Your memory doesn't.

Your eyes...

Your eyes...

They still appear
when I close mine,

and for one impossible moment,

they feel like
the only place
my heart has ever called paradise.