The Web That is not a Home Anymore

There is a place in the house

where even the moon refuses to linger—

a hollow corner steeped in dust and forgetting.

It is here the spider works,

fragile as a dying heartbeat,

invisible to all but the quiet tragedies of night.

She moves slowly now,

as if each thread costs her a year of life.

Her silk drips from her

like something torn from the inside,

a thin surrender stretched into trembling lines.

There is no hope in the way she weaves.

Only habit.

Only hunger.

Only the soft, cruel memory

of what will never come.

Her web is not a home anymore.

It is a memorial—

a place to bury all the nights

she waited for wings that never brushed her doorway.

And still she builds.

Not out of faith.

Not out of purpose.

But because the darkness

has already hollowed her too deeply

to remember how to stop.

She knows the wind will tear her masterpiece

like careless fingers tearing a letter

never meant to be read.

She knows,

and still she spins—

the eternal servant

of a desire that never feeds her back.

How cruelly familiar that is.

For I, too, have become a creature

who no longer loves you with hope,

only with instinct—

a tired, bone-deep reflex

that persists long after meaning

has rotted away.

I no longer imagine you hearing me.

I no longer imagine warmth,

or return,

or mercy.

I simply ache in your direction,

the way a phantom limb aches

for a hand long severed.

I build my longing quietly now,

thread by invisible thread,

not because you deserve it—

but because I have been emptied

into the shape of your absence

for too long to become anything else.

And when morning comes

and shreds her final web,

the spider will not flinch.

She has lost too many worlds

to mourn another.

She will simply begin again—

slowly, painfully—

because she has no other way to live.

Just as I will rise

with a heart heavy as soaked ash,

and love you again—

not with hope,

but with the despairing persistence

of something that no longer remembers

how to be free.

Relentless.

Unending.

And never returned.