The days arrive and depart,
each one quieter than the last,
like footsteps fading down a hallway
with no promise of return.

The hours spill into one another,
and every face looks the same,
blurred outlines of voices
that do not reach me.

I have tried to fill the silence,
with routine, with work, with anything
that makes the clock seem less cruel,
yet still it beats against my ribs.

Memories linger like smoke,
not enough to hold,
but too thick to ignore,
choking even in their absence.

And when all else fades into dust,
when nothing is left to want or to keep,
the absence sharpens into the only truth,
but its existence is the one I keep longing for.

I leave my smile
to those who swore it was real,
who mistook the curve of my lips
for a map to happiness.

I leave my silence
to those who filled it with their own truths,
who dictated what I felt
while never asking what I carried.

I leave my laughter, brittle as glass,
to the rooms that echoed it back
without hearing the crack beneath.

And my sorrow,
I bury it with me,
for no one believed it lived here anyway.

This is all I have to give,
not money, not treasures,
only the remnants of a heart
misnamed, misread,
and finally laid to rest.

The sorrow did not arrive with thunder,
it crept, a slow suffocation,
until the chest forgot how to rise,
until the veins pulsed only with silence.

It was not merely pain,
but a drowning,
each breath dragged through glass,
each thought heavier than stone.

Sleep gave no refuge,
dreams became ruins,
and waking was worse,
a return to a world stripped of color,
a place where even hope was ash.

This was sadness at its cruelest,
a weight too vast for flesh,
too sharp for memory,
a darkness so complete
it left the soul hollow,
aching, and numb all at once.

There was once a soul who waited,
not for riches or for fame,
but for the warmth of simple words,
and the keeping of a name.

Each promise carried weight unspoken,
each “later” tied a fragile thread,
but silence came and filled the spaces,
where presence should have been instead.

The heart did not break in thunder,
no storm tore it apart,
it faded slowly, day by day,
from being half-forgotten in the dark.

This is how people drift away,
not in fire, not in fights,
but in the quiet moments missed,
in the absence of good nights.

And in the end, the hardest cost:
a promise delayed is a promise lost.

Grief is not an accident, nor a flaw of the heart.
It is the shadow cast by love,
and no life that has known love can escape it.

To grieve deeply is not a mark of weakness,
but of fullness.
For the heart does not mourn emptiness,
it mourns only what was real,
what once gave weight to our existence.

Love and grief are twin truths,
bound together in the order of things.
To receive one is to inherit the other.
When love departs, grief remains,
not as an enemy, but as its last and faithful servant.

Thus, to grieve is to testify,
that there was something in this fleeting world
so worthy, so profound,
that its absence could unmake us.

Grief, then, is the final language of love.
Where lips fall silent,
where hands can no longer reach,
grief speaks, and in speaking,
keeps love alive.

Once, his days were colored by her voice,
a sound so bright it painted the silence,
made even the smallest hours
feel like they carried meaning.

He remembers it still,
like a lantern's glow kept in a jar,
warm, flickering,
but dimmer each time he opens it.

There was a season
when her laughter was the wind in his sails,
when every "good morning"
felt like a promise the world was kinder
than he ever dared believe.

But seasons do not last.
Even spring, with all its blossoms,
must give way to the weight of time.

And so the days pass.
He still feels her,
like the ghost of perfume on an old scarf,
or the echo of footsteps in an empty hall.
It lingers, but softer now,
a whisper instead of a shout.

This is how love fades,
not with the cruelty of sudden silence,
but with the gentleness of distance,
a slow unraveling of threads
that once held his heart together.

He does not curse it,
nor cling to it as he once did.
For he knows now,
love does not vanish,
it transforms.

And one day,
when the ache is only a shadow,
he will look back at her smile in memory,
and instead of breaking,
he will simply whisper,

"thank you."

He once thought the hardest part
was losing her,
but he was wrong.

The real wound came later,
when he saw her laugh with someone else,
that same laugh that had once
split his silence wide open.

It was not betrayal,
not even cruelty,
just the simple cruelty of life,
how quickly the sacred
becomes ordinary again.

Another would learn her pauses,
her little turns of phrase,
the way she tilted her head
before saying something soft.
Another would walk the paths
he thought were carved for him.

And he,
helpless,
watched the living memory unfold.
Not a ghost of her,
but a ghost of himself,
standing outside the firelight,
unwelcome, unnecessary,
a chapter left open
but never read again.

Some nights he would whisper,
not to her,
but to the empty air,
"I am still here,
bleeding quietly,
while you write your next beginning."

For ghosts do not come from the dead,
they come from the living,
and nothing is crueler
than seeing your forever
become someone else’s beginning.