Cinnamon and Static.

The air was cinnamon that October night—

sharp, sweet, the kind that stains your throat.

We balanced on your fire escape, ankles hooked

on iron teeth, the city exhaling beneath us

like a beast shrugging off its neon coat.

You laughed, and it crackled—a radio caught

between stations, half song, half storm.

I counted the pauses where your hands drew

constellations from taxi streaks, your voice

a match struck too close to the dark.

Nothing lasts, you said. A train howled

two streets away, and I swallowed the lie whole,

let it dissolve like aspirin on my tongue.

You left before the sky bled, taking the half-smoked

cigarettes and every what-if we’d strung

between us. Now, I harvest endings:

the flicker before a screen dies, the hitch

in a stranger’s breath when they hug too long,

the silence after a phone slips underwater—

small apocalypses I pocket like loose change.

Yesterday, a girl on the subway clutched

a ticket to Anywhere. Her knuckles whitened

as tunnels roared. I saw your ghost in her jaw,

the way she bit down on goodbye. My stop came.

I let the doors gasp shut, carry her

into the dark. The rails sang stay, stay, stay—

a refrain I’ve learned to unhear.

But here’s the twist: sometimes,

when the world feels thin as a moth’s wing,

I taste cinnamon. And for a breath,

I’m back there—bruised, alive,

aching for the static between stars.

You? You’re everywhere.

A flicker in every almost, every not quite.

A ghost in the machinery of letting go.