The Books I Never Wrote

In the library of books never written, the shelves bend beneath the weight of stories that never found a voice.

Each spine bears a title I recognize like a scar within me.

Here is The Manual of Tenderness I Failed to Offer.

Here is Atlas of Roads I Never Took.

Here is Correspondence with Faces I Passed Without Stopping.

Further on, dusty yet luminous, rests How to Survive the Grief That Was Not Supposed to Exist.

Beside it, small, almost unreadable, The Poem I Would Have Written If I Had Dared to Stay.

I reach out my hand, but the books withdraw.

They cannot be opened.

You can only read their titles, and guess at the worlds trembling between closed covers.

The Season That Vanished Before Arriving.

The House I Lived In Without Ever Living There.

The Swallowed Words That Could Have Saved Me.

The Children I Never Had Who Still Call Me in Dreams.

In this library, there is no silence, no dust —

only a continuous murmur,

the rustle of suspended futures.

Each book is a possible life, each title a mute confession.

I linger for hours in this impossible hall,

until I understand that I am made of these absences,

that my flesh is the binding of everything that never came to pass.

And when at last I leave, hands empty,

I hear behind me the library breathing,

as if to remind me that even the books never written

weigh enough to fill an entire life.