. (or: the slow mercy of being forgotten) .
I keep the lights dim now—
not out of mood,
but because shadows are gentler
when you no longer belong to the future.
The watch still doesn’t tick.
I wear it anyway.
Not to remember time,
but to remind myself I once commanded it.
His coat is still here,
draped over the back of the chair
like an exhale that forgot to finish.
Some nights I sleep beside it.
It doesn’t smell like him anymore.
I replay our first conversation like a hymn
missing half its words.
I remember what I said.
I don’t remember if I meant it.
The bed is quieter than it should be.
Not empty—just echoing
with choices I let make themselves.
I heard he’s moved on.
Young lover, new city,
same crooked smile
twisting someone else’s orbit.
And good.
Let him become legend
in someone else's story.
I already built a temple
he burned into blueprint.
I tried to write him a letter once.
It became a list.
Then a poem.
Then silence.
I left it unfinished.
Some things are meant to haunt,
not conclude.
There’s a thunderstorm tonight.
I sit by the window with a glass of nothing
and watch the sky argue with itself.
For a second,
the lightning looks like him.
And for the briefest flicker—
just long enough to ache—
I believe I was loved.
{fin}
The fifth and final part in the myth of Chronogamy is the ash after the fire—the silence that settles once the thunder has left the sky. The relationship is over, but its echo lingers in objects, habits, and memory’s unreliable architecture. This final movement is not about heartbreak; it’s about displacement—a god dethroned from his own myth, left to wander the ruins of what used to be himself.
The intent in this final part is to show that grief doesn’t always roar—it hums. The poem becomes a haunted room where affection remains only in posture, in ghosts that look like him only when lightning hits right. The speaker does not seek closure. He preserves the ache because it’s the last proof he was ever touched at all.
The myth ends not with vengeance, but with recognition:
"To be consumed is divine. To be remembered is accidental."
The Chronogamy Collection:
https://hellopoetry.com/collection/136301/chronogamy/
