Aching

She lives in a quiet house

that hums with everything unspoken.

From the outside it looks peaceful,

but inside, time hangs like wet laundry;

heavy, unmoving,

smelling faintly of what used to be alive.

Each morning, she builds the day from habit.

She moves through it carefully,

measuring her words,

pouring her care into corners

that never echo back.

There is conversation,

but not the kind that feeds.

Only talk of small things,

a light bulb, a meal, a bill,

nothing that touches the soul.

There is no romance here,

no spark hiding behind a glance.

Her body waits for affection

that never arrives.

It has forgotten how it feels

to be reached for with hunger,

or to be kissed without reason.

She aches in ways

that do not have names.

Nights are the hardest.

Sleep used to be a place she went to rest.

Now it is a battlefield of sound.

The snoring beside her

pounds against her skull

like a clock that refuses mercy.

Sometimes she presses a pillow to her ears,

sometimes she stares at the ceiling

and imagines silence

as a kind of heaven.

She watches him drift away

without ever moving.

Wine in his hand,

eyes fixed on something glowing,

time slipping quietly between them

like a thief that no one stops.

If she cries,

the room remains still.

Tears dry faster in this air.

She has learned

how to hide her softness

so it does not bruise her twice.

She misses laughter,

not polite laughter,

but the kind that doubles her over,

that fills her chest

until she forgets to be sad.

She misses touch,

that electric reminder

that she exists beneath the skin.

She misses deep talk,

the kind that stretches through the night

and makes her feel known.

She is aging from the inside out.

Loneliness leaves its fingerprints

in the mirror.

Still, she tries to bloom

picking flowers from her own quiet strength,

arranging them in a vase of hope,

as if beauty might answer her back.

She lives beside someone,

yet she is alone.

And each night,

as the snoring fills the room again,

she lies awake and wonders

if this is how love disappears.

Not with cruelty,

but with the slow forgetting

of how to see each other.