Writers 
I still love you in the places
where I promised myself I wouldn't.
In the quiet of my phone,
where your name used to light up,
and in the songs I can't listen to
without hearing your laugh.
I did not just love you,
I built my entire life around your breathing.
You were not a chapter,
you were the language my heart learned to speak.
Now you are gone,
but my tongue still remembers the words.
I know I should let go.
I tell myself every morning,
like a prayer I don't believe in.
But healing is not a door I can just walk through,
it's a long road where I walk barefoot,
while my heart keeps looking back.
Distance was supposed to save me.
So I moved far, I stopped calling, I stopped texting
I stopped checking.
But distance is a funny thing,
it makes the body forget,
but the soul remembers.
How do you heal a wound
when the knife is still inside you
and you are the one holding it?
How do you unlove someone
who was once home?
Do you erase their voice from your memory?
Do you teach your hands not to reach for them?
I have tried.
I have tried to hate you.
God, I have begged for hate,
because hate would be easier than this.
Hate would let me sleep at night.
But all I feel is this quiet, violent ache,
like a hand wrapped around my throat
that never squeezes enough to kill me,
just enough to remind me I am still alive.
I have cried for you in places
where no one could hear me,
in the shower,
in the car with the music too loud,
in the middle of the night
when the world is quiet
and my mind is loudest.
Maybe one day, this ache will soften.
Maybe one day, I will hear your name
and feel nothing but peace.
Until then,
I carry this love like a wound
that I am learning to live with,
not because I want to,
but because I don't know how not to.
