There is a hole now.
Not torn, not ripped
but hollowed.
Like wind wore down the center of me
with soft, persistent cruelty.
No thunderclap,
just the slow erosion
of something that once stood watch.
You were barely more than breath,
a flicker in the straw,
a warm weight that made morning feel
intentional.
And I
the one who named myself protector
looked away.
That is all it took.
One glance elsewhere,
and the universe took back its loan.
I did not cry out when it happened.
There was no sound left in me.
Only the sick realization
that absence has a shape.
That love leaves residue.
That I was the architect of your undoing.
Now the days come blank.
Food tastes like guilt.
The sky is heavy with things I cannot fix.
My hands. these hands
they shake, not from fear,
but from knowing they could have stopped it.
How many heartbeats have passed
since yours didn’t?
Time moves, but I do not follow.
I sit within the rift,
counting all the ways I failed you
a thousand imagined rescues
playing out too late,
too slow.
There is no metaphor here.
No phoenix in the ashes.
Just me,
and the grave I dug
with the illusion of safety.
Hope feels obscene now,
as if it doesn’t remember
who you were.
And I am tired.
So deeply tired.
Because to love something,
and then lose it
to your own neglect,
is to live each moment afterward
as punishment.