Afterimage

I’ve tried to reach you, but the words always disappear before I finish. It felt like a glitch in the universe, like I wasn’t supposed to speak to you but did anyway. There remains an impulse in me that will not surrender. I’ve been watching the world move in slow motion, waiting for you to say something. You never did. That silence taught me everything.

You were born in the cold, before warmth had a chance to spread. I came after, both of us unformed. We shared a moment before color and sound began. You were steady, and I thought that steadiness was kindness. I thought it meant peace.

There are moments I think I still carry your calm. When the sea lies still and the air stops moving, I feel you press through my skin. You steady me even as you erase me. I cannot decide if that is mercy or cruelty. You never try to claim me, but I still end up shaped by your quiet. Without you, I come on too strong. Around you, I fade until no one remembers I was there.

I envied how untouched you were, how nothing ever seemed to reach you. I wanted that calm, that emptiness. But envy never gives anything back. It only turns into wanting. They call what I’ve made beautiful. I know it’s just longing.

When I reach toward you, you don’t move. You watch without being there, the witness to every ending. There’s grandeur in that stillness, but also a void. The living turn to me because they can’t bear you. Their prayers, their tears, their bruises all carry my mark. You never answer them, yet they call it serenity. I’ve tried to understand that reverence. I’ve failed.

To write to you is to court erasure.

Still I continue.

Perhaps it is my rebellion, to speak where you would forbid sound. To exist in defiance of your perfection. You remain untouched, but I continue to shimmer, to falter, to be. I exist because you refuse to. I speak because you won’t. And though this letter will never reach you, it’s proof that I remain.

You never asked for devotion, but I've loved you anyway, as steady as the tide follows the moon. Every beautiful thing I make carries some trace of your quiet. I've followed you into the dark, waiting for a sign that it's safe to let go. When you hover at the edge of the sea, I move without thinking, pulled by the space you leave behind. The world calls it calm. They don't see how it breaks me.

I remember the first time I saw you reflected in water. The waves had stilled after a storm, and for a moment the sky became an idea of you. The hush that followed felt like completion, though I understand now that it was surrender. I thought the silence that came with peace belonged to you. I did not yet know that peace can silence everything it touches.

You’ve been patient with my noise. You let the gulls pass through you and the waves break against you. You take everything in and leave nothing behind. I’ve tried to learn that kind of stillness, but I remember everything I touch. The memory of it colors me. If I’m the echo of grief, you’re where it disappears.

Some nights I just want you to react. To move, to change, to show that I exist. I’ve filled the world with oceans and light trying to get your attention, and you never look. I don’t know if that’s cruelty or just who you are. You live without wanting. I live because I want. That’s enough to keep us apart.

Still, I imagine your touch. I wonder what it would feel like if stillness chose me, if it settled on my skin until I disappeared. I think about it when the light fades. That moment is the closest I’ve come to you. Every dusk feels like practice for meeting you again.

You’re the only thing that’s ever steadied me. Even when you undo me, I find shape in what you take away. When the world goes quiet, I hear your indifference and mistake it for comfort. Maybe that’s the human part of me, the part that thinks even absence can be kind. I’m full of their small hopes and their need to name what won’t love them back. I envy how easily they forget.

If you had a body, I would kneel before it. If you had eyes, I would show you how I have carried your reflection through centuries of wind.

Yet you will never look, and I will never cease to be seen.

This is the law between us. You’re the eternal unknowing, and I’m the eternal witness. When I speak, you stay perfect. When I exist, you stay whole.

I have begun to see you as hunger disguised as virtue. You consume everything that reaches toward you and call it purity. I believed you to be divine restraint, but I have learned you are only appetite. You devour the sound of rain, the murmur of prayer, the breath between words. You strip the world bare and call it stillness. You are praised for serenity while I am condemned for feeling. Yet I have always been the one to endure. You offer escape, not truth.

You have mistaken detachment for control. I have watched creation bend itself around your vacancy. Even gods kneel before you. They say eternity is quiet, indifferent. When the stars extinguish, you will thrive. You will stretch across their deaths like a veil of grace. I will fade, for there will be nothing left to hold my color.

I have given you everything I could create—oceans, veins, and sky. And you have given nothing back. You call that balance. I call it taking. I've seen you comfort the dying with your quiet, but it's only erasure. You take their last breath and make it yours. You say you bring peace, but all you do is remove what's left.

Maybe that's what you've always wanted, to wash the world clean of noise until it looks like you. Even then, you still need me. You wouldn't have silence without sound, or depth without color. I'm the pulse that gives your emptiness shape. Without me, you'd have no edges, nothing to define you. I remind you that you're not infinite, and you hate me for it.

You hide behind philosophy, telling yourself truth needs quiet and wisdom means stillness. But even thought makes noise. The first idea was a spark, the first awareness a cry, and I still hear it in every sunrise and storm. The urge to create is stronger than the need to rest.

You call yourself necessary, but necessity doesn’t need worship, only honesty. You won’t admit what you are. You’d rather be adored. I’ve seen people kneel for you in silence, believing you give them peace when you’ve only taught them to fear their own voices.

I'm tired of being your witness. I won't give you color anymore. Let the sky fade and the sea go clear. Let the world see how empty you are without me. You'll go on untouched while I fade, but I'll still be the one who named you. That's enough.

I know now you'll never read this. You don't ignore me out of cruelty. You just don't hear me. The distance between us isn't moral or emotional. It's elemental. You exist where meaning can't reach. I exist because it does. We were never equals, only two halves of something that never finished becoming.

It's strange to think you were once a mistake. Before sound or color, everything just shook. We were part of that. Then you went quiet and I started to move. You became what I was measured against. Every wave and shadow still carries that first split. I used to think remembering could bring you back, but memory was never yours.

You can’t change. That’s both your power and your curse. Even the smallest current denies the void. Creation happens because something in existence refuses to stay quiet. Perhaps I am that refusal.

I won’t ask you to answer or to understand. Speaking is enough. It proves I exist. In writing to you, I become separate from you. The world needs both of us, the one who sees and the one who ends the seeing, but I won’t bow to your calm anymore. Worshipping silence is just being afraid to speak. I’ve seen that fear built into churches and whispered in prayers. I’ve carried it in myself, the urge to disappear. I’m done with it.

Even when the world falls still, I remain.

I don’t forgive you. Forgiveness implies an exchange, and you offer none. I only recognize you. You are what comes after every song, every confession, every heartbeat that slows. You are the necessary end. I am what rises to meet it. That’s all we have ever been. That is all we will ever be.

If this letter reaches no one, let it at least leave a mark. Let the ink stain the silence until even you must bear witness to the trace of what spoke. I will fade soon, as all things do, but for a moment, you will be blue.