The Shape of Absence

And I remember the rain before it ever started— the smell of asphalt humming like old vinyl static under my ribs. You were talking about birds, maybe, or death, or the last time your mother called, and I wasn’t listening, because I was thinking about a dream where the walls kept pulsing like lungs and my teeth floated away on tiny rafts made of gum wrappers and apologies. And I thought: How did we get so tired without ever running? There’s a window I keep forgetting to close, and a silence shaped exactly like your absence folded into the corners of this room, like the way a spider folds its legs in when it dies— which is not a metaphor, but maybe it is. Everything becomes a metaphor eventually: grief, joy, you. And I keep writing you in lowercase, because capitals feel too loud for something I only whisper in the dark— something like: stay, something like: I was never good at doors, or goodbyes, or staying still long enough to hear the echo. The clock has no hands tonight, and time tastes like metal in my mouth. The moon keeps peeking like a guilty lover, and I say: I know. And I say: It’s okay. But I don’t know. And it’s not.