The Moon Stayed, But You Didn’t

I looked at the moon. I whispered your name.
It stayed.

But this is not that kind of poem.
Not for the polite ears of jasmine-scented readers.
This is not parchment. This is the skin of my chest peeled open.
This is me, barefoot in the cathedral of your silence.
This is me — a shiver made of vowels,
a cathedral of longing built from abandoned breath.

I—yes, me—stood under a sky drunk on nostalgia.
The moon was not beautiful. It was broken.
It wore craters like lovers who left without folding the sheets.
And I said your name—God,
your name, your name—like it was the last matchstick
in the fist of a freezing poet.
And the moon didn’t flinch.
It stayed.
Because you…
you had once told it to.

You. The idea of you. The ache of you.
You, braided into the marrow of my hourglass.
I tried to delete you like a typo in a fevered love letter,
but your syllables had teeth.
They bit my throat when I tried to swallow you.
Now I speak in a lisp of missing you.

I whispered your name.
Not shouted. No.
Not screamed. That would be merciful.
But whispered—
like the last breath of a dying violin
beneath the heavy feet of marching time.

Your name—
a gossamer curse.
A cloud folded like origami regret.
The way a match smells after it’s blown out.
The way a letter feels
when it’s never opened but read a thousand times in dreams.

The moon didn't blink.
It never does.
Even when I weep loud enough to salt the stars.
Even when I tried to kiss it
because it looked like the curve of your shoulder
when you turned away that night.
You know the one.
The night the air smelled of almosts.
The night I turned into a phantom with your name tattooed on my silence.

I became lowercase.
a footnote in your autobiography.
a margin doodle in your book of departures.

But still, I whispered.

I whispered your name—
in Morse code to fireflies,
in burnt toast and sleep-talking and bus windows blurred by rain.
Your name—
it unraveled me.
Turned me into an echo in a hall where you never lived.
But where I still set the table.

I made tea for your ghost.
I danced in your absence
like a madman in a room with mirrors made of memory.
And each time the kettle hissed,
I imagined it said,
“She’s not coming.”
But the moon said nothing.
It stayed.
Mocking me with its permanence.
Mocking me with your favorite shade of ache.

Is this love, then?
A trembling between galaxies?
The geometry of maybe?
The physics of still wanting you
even after I’ve forgotten my own name
but not how your eyes pulled tide from me?
Not how your laughter carved doorways in my spine
for hope to sneak in again and again
and rob me bare.

I whispered.
Whispered like wind through your old hoodie.
Whispered like unanswered prayers that didn't know God left the room.

Do you know what your name sounds like
when spoken into a cracked wine glass at 2:11 a.m.?
It sounds like forever breaking itself just to stay near me.
It sounds like the last truth a liar tells before sleeping.

And the moon?
It stayed.
Still.
Still like the way your hand used to hold mine
during movies we never finished.
Still like the air when you said goodbye
without saying goodbye.

I wanted it to vanish.
I wanted proof that your name had power.
That it could shatter something
besides me.

But the moon stayed.
Like a stubborn promise.
Like your scent on the inside of my favorite book.
Like the song we never danced to
but always felt in our teeth.

Maybe love is not the crescendo
but the silence after.
The echo, the absence,
the sob stuck in the throat of the earth.
Maybe it's the moon
—unmoved, unmoveable—
bearing witness to my unraveling
with the cruel grace of indifference.

I tried again.
I whispered your name backward.
As if I could undo time.
Undo us.
Undo the kiss we didn’t have.
The life we almost lived.
I whispered your name
as a question.
As a key.
As a scar.

And the moon?
It stayed.
Oh God, it stayed.

Stayed like the moment between two people
who almost say I love you,
but instead blink.
Stayed like the note that never made it to your door.
Like the petal from the rose you didn’t see
when I placed it on your pillow the last time.

I looked at the moon.
It wasn’t metaphor.
It was an accomplice.
A witness.
A thief of secrets
that now glow on its cratered face
like the freckles you used to hate
but I used to kiss.

Your name is still there.
In my throat.
On the moon.
In the gap between songs.
In the way I flinch when someone says
her favorite movie is the same as yours.

The moon stayed.
You didn’t.
But I—I—
I whispered.
And that, my love,
is the only war I ever won.

And the only one I never wanted to.