Goodbye

It lingers. Not on the lips. Lower. In the fiber of the tongue, in the spasming depths of fear, where words no longer light paths, but only fester in ancestral silences, like icons submerged in sacred rubble, beneath the cracked beams of a church welded shut from within, where even devils can no longer enter. Parting is not spoken. It is torn between teeth, swallowed with blood and shame, breaking in the throat like a rusted tin can, left there, amid silences fallen into the abyss, tasting of old iron and sullied rain on the cross of a mother, unwept by anyone. You were the silence. Absolute. White. Like a verdict. The air congealed between us, sour and cursed, like the milk of forgotten dreams, carrying within it the worms of the last word. My mouth? A burned temple. An altar abandoned by every god. The bells corroded before they could be touched. Even the angels no longer descended. Pain has its own language: the salty touch of blood licked by one’s own breath, just to know you’re still alive. The bitterness of doors slammed too late, when you’ve already said too much and too little. The footsteps? Traced in chalk on the asphalt of oblivion. Washed away by the first rain of forgiveness that never came. I didn’t cry. I swallowed. Everything. Including “goodbye,” which tasted of a sanctified lie, the first one I whispered to the mirror and believed. Like blood: red. Warm. True. Until the skin forgot it.