The Disassembly: A Symphony of Almosts and Forgotten Answers #poetry

(redacted. redacted. still bleeding through.)

I woke up in a house made entirely of your almost-smile.
Each window blinked once, and then forgot it had ever seen me.
You were the postman of unsent words.
I was the mailbox with a lock no one forged a key for.
(We were both mistakes written in invisible ink.)

Somewhere — not here, never here —
You picked petals off a flower that never bloomed,
Chanting:
Love me?
Leave me?
Haunt me?
Heal me?
I wanted to answer.
I wanted to be the dirt under your fingernails.
Instead,
I was just the echo under your tongue,
Dry,
Splintered,
Undelivered.

You were the blueprint I burned to stay warm.
I was the architect who forgot the roof.
Guilt, you see, guilt is a featherless bird:
It hops.
It keens.
It dies somewhere ugly,
And you bury it with your own trembling hands.
Only, you never knew.
And I never confessed.
Our crime scene: sterilized.
Our fingerprints: smudged into prayers.

I turned you into an archive,
A microfilm of half-held moments:
Your laugh glitching,
Your eyes pixelated,
Your hands — oh, your hands —
Writing new languages on the fog of my forgetting.
I read you backward.
I loved you wrong.
I buried you under good intentions, and forgot the eulogy.

You wear my absence like a coat two sizes too big.
I wear your memory like a boot filled with broken glass.
Somewhere,
We limp toward each other
And miss.

You once left a paper boat in my dream.
It capsized in a puddle made of my unspoken sentences.
I gathered it up, dripping ink and sorrow,
And tucked it under my ribcage.
It’s still there,
Mildewed,
Singing.

Do you feel it?
Some nights,
When the stars blink too slowly,
When the air smells of storms that never break—
Do you feel my apology,
Folded a thousand times smaller than regret,
Floating toward your spine?

I carry your ghost like an unwrapped gift.
You carry my love like a misdialed number.
If you ever answer —
One day —
It will be static,
And my voice will be a memory even I don't recognize anymore.

We are catalogued under "Maybe"
In the library of lost things.
Your file is still active.
Mine is cross-referenced with shame.

Once,
In a different heartbeat,
You brushed my sleeve and I mistook it for a miracle.
(I kept the sleeve.)
(I never wore it again.)

In another life,
You tell me you almost loved me,
But the translation got lost in the static.
I nod.
I nod forever.

And in this life?
I sit under the blinking EXIT sign of hope,
Waiting for a version of me
Brave enough
To call you home.
You walk by, carrying your whole sky,
Never seeing me.
And that is the ending.
And that is the beginning.
And that is the unsolvable X.

The archives of our moments are long overdue.
I filed them under "Fate" and forgot where the drawer was.
There was a time when I was the keeper of you,
And you — the keeper of my broken heart.
But I lost the combination,
And now the chest is sealed with the dust of years gone by.

Sometimes, I hear the soft thud of your footsteps in my sleep.
They echo through the chambers of forgotten mornings.
Each step cracks open a new wound,
But I dare not touch the edges,
For fear they’ll bleed into the world.
I keep the wound closed by stitching my thoughts into another life,
Where we never spoke,
Where we never touched,
Where we never almost loved.

I once waited at a station,
A train to nowhere,
And you were the conductor whose whistle never blew.
We were both passengers,
But never on the same train.
Your face was the station’s fog,
And my heart,
A compass pointing in a thousand wrong directions.

The ghosts of us,
The fragments of conversations half-spoken,
Are left behind like forgotten receipts in the pockets of old coats.
I sift through them,
I touch them,
But the ink fades,
The paper disintegrates,
And I never find what I’m searching for.

Your absence lingers like the last notes of a song I never got to hear.
I played it on repeat in my mind,
But the melody shifted,
The harmony broke,
And I had to stop listening to the silence that remained.
But still, I hum it in the dark —
A lullaby to memories that only half-remember me.

Sometimes, I imagine you turning the corner,
And I’ll be standing there with the words we never said.
I’ll have them wrapped in ribbons,
Ready to untie them one by one.
But as you approach,
You’ll look right through me,
As if I were just a shadow.
And I’ll whisper the final words,
To no one at all:
"I was always here."

And that is the ending.
And that is the beginning.
And that is the unsolvable X.

(fragment closed. love never located.)

#TheDisassembly #AlmostLove #LoveAndLoss #UnspokenWords #GhostsOfThePast #FragmentedLove #MemoryOfYou #RegretAndGuilt #UnresolvedFeelings #PoetryOfAbsence