The Calendar That Lives Inside Me

There are springs that bloom only in my mind,

fields of brightness I never walked through,

the scent of lilacs that never were real

yet follow me like a second skin.

There are winters the world has never known —

snow falling in a shuttered room,

ice etched on a window that did not exist.

I invented them to explain the cold I carried inside.

I remember autumns no one else lived:

trees leaning like weary old men,

their leaves neither crimson nor gold,

but shining with liquid light,

as if time itself had melted.

And summers, scorching, where the sea was a mirage,

where the sand sang beneath my steps,

where the laughter I heard

belonged to friends I never met.

These imagined seasons became my cartography:

they filled the blanks between true memories,

stitched fragments of brightness

into the places where recollection tore.

I live inside a secret calendar:

days that never were

sometimes feel more real

than the ones I survived.

Perhaps this is what it means to exist:

to carry within us landscapes invented,

to watch them fade and return,

horizons that refuse to be forgotten.

So I close my eyes,

and the world opens in four directions:

a spring that never flowered,

a summer burning without a sun,

an autumn dissolving into water,

a winter no one has ever known.

And at the center, myself —

holding in my palms

the seasons that exist only in my memory.