Our Home Still Thinks You're Here

As dusk settles,

and the water boils,


I set out one bowl.


One fork. One green cup.


The phantoms appear


like houseguests I never invited.


Your stomping echoes through the floor– 


no longer thunder,


but a whisper,

faint and unpredictable,


beneath the wood.

We built a life in these walls.


Laughed between shelves and sheets,


plotted vacation homes beside grocery lists,


left love notes in sketchbooks,


hid promises in shared itineraries.

The shower still clogs like it used to.


Only now,


no one sees it


but me.

Now,


I come home

to afterimages.


To the gravity of small things


that hum with endings.


To holes in the drywall


and rooms rearranged


just enough to lie


and pretend you were never here.


But you were.


You are.


Everywhere.

The alley cat still sits

on your side of the couch.


He glares 


like he knows it was me.


That I unlocked the door,


watched you leave,


and stayed still.

I didn’t chase you.

Because what we were


deserved a gentler ending


than staying could offer.

Isn’t that love’s quiet cruelty?


That the truest kind


sometimes steps aside,


not because it’s finished,


but because it knows


when to make space


for something whole.

You left behind photographs.


Notes in my handwriting.


Cards I once believed


might outlive us.

And I let the silence swallow me,


because even your leaving


felt like a kind of intimacy.


Even the emptiness you left


carried your scent.

Our home still thinks you're here.


I can’t figure out how to tell the stone


that I now live alone.


Or how to tell myself, either.

Still,
 with each sting,
 I remind myself:


you’ll be lighter now.


Unburdened.


Happier.

You’ll go on


to build a new future 


where arms aren’t flinched from,


where love seals its leaks,


where no one burns themselves


to keep the other warm.

I hope you find that.


I do.

And I hope


when you remember

our home

you recall the days we didn’t go outside


because what we had


was already enough.

Even though I was the one


who named the ending, 


my hands are still red.

Grieving the living has an ache

that’s stranger to articulate

or consecrate

than mourning the dead.

This home,


the life we built inside it,


still harbors your names


in every uncluttered corner.


I can’t scrub you from memory


without stripping the parts of me


you softened.

The quiet brought a reckoning

that revealed,


as bestowed upon me,

I only know myself

through the lens of grief.

Home is a place


I only know

how to leave.

And yet,


my heart waits here in silence.

Tethered not to the future we left behind


but clutching the thread between us

begging it not to break


as I slowly

set it down.