Ashes of What We Were

I. The Hollow Morning

I wake to a house that no longer breathes,

Walls echoing the absence of your laughter,

The sunlight creeps, timid and cold,

Touching the place where your shadow used to linger.

I taste the bitterness of silence,

Each moment without you a hollow drum

That beats against the fragile bones of memory.

I remember the mornings we kissed

Before the world had any claim on us,

The way your hair would spill over my fingers,

The warmth that made me believe

Time itself could never betray us.

But time betrayed us anyway.

It crept between our words,

Slipped through the cracks of our promises,

And left me drowning in echoes of your leaving.

II. The Weight of Regret

I see now how fragile my love was—

Fragile and selfish,

A cage that held you tighter than I should have,

A mirror that reflected only my own desire.

I wanted to keep you,

Not let you be free,

And in doing so, I pushed you away

Into a silence I cannot penetrate.

Every apology I never whispered

Lives inside me like a stone in the chest,

A weight that bends my spine

And curls my thoughts into knots of despair.

If only I had listened more,

If only I had held less of myself and more of you,

Perhaps we would still walk side by side

Through streets that now feel like graves.

III. The Haunting

I hear your voice in the wind,

Soft, impossible, a cruel imitation

Of what I lost.

I close my eyes and see your smile,

And I remember all the things I ruined:

The quiet dinners, the midnight talks,

The way you dreamed aloud and I was too deaf

To hear the music of your heart.

I am haunted by the “if” and “maybe,”

By the shadows of decisions

That I cannot undo,

By the doors I slammed shut

When all you needed was a hand to hold.

Even now, years later,

I stumble over the ghosts of us,

Wishing that regret had the power

To rewind the world.

IV. The Silence Between Us

The silence is deafening.

I reach for your hand in my memory,

And it slips through my fingers like smoke.

The bed is too wide, the sheets too cold,

The nights stretch endlessly

Into a landscape of longing and failure.

I talk to the darkness,

Begging it to bring you back,

But it only answers with emptiness,

And the cruel clarity of loss.

I used to believe that love could conquer all,

That devotion was armor against life’s betrayals.

But love is not enough when pride and fear

Build walls higher than hope.

And now the echo of your absence

Is louder than any word I could have spoken,

Louder than any vow I could have kept.

V. The Ashes

I walk through the ruins of us,

Picking up fragments of memory

Like pieces of broken glass.

I see your laughter in the dust,

I smell your perfume in the corners of rooms,

I feel the warmth of your hand

In the empty space beside me.

Everything I touch reminds me

Of what I failed to cherish.

Even the stars seem cruel now,

Flaring in the night sky as if to mock

The darkness that resides in me,

The regret that will never leave.

If I could, I would tell you a thousand times:

I was wrong. I was blind. I was foolish.

But words are ghosts,

And you are gone.

All I have left is the ache,

The relentless pulse of knowing

That love lost through carelessness

Is a wound that never heals.

VI. The Last Whisper

So I sit with the memory of you,

A companion as faithful as sorrow,

And I whisper into the void:

I am sorry. I am sorry. I am sorry.

For every cruel silence, every harsh word,

Every moment I failed to be the one you needed.

Perhaps time will dull this pain,

Perhaps life will teach me humility,

Perhaps some distant sun will rise

On a heart I have rebuilt from ashes.

But in this moment, I am undone,

Bound by the chains of love’s bitter lesson,

Living in the shadow of what we could have been,

And mourning the impossible truth:

You were everything,

And I let you slip away.