The Ghost on the Other Pillow

Your side of bed still holds a shape that clocks refuse to know,

a shallow moon where gravity remembers how you go.

The sheets have learned your silhouette, the dent your dreams once made—

A ghost upon the other pillow, softly, stubbornly, stayed.

︵‿︵‿

It’s not a sheet thrown over chains, no rattling hallway fright,

just absence with a body, love, rehearsing you each night.

The cotton keeps your shoulder’s curve, your breath’s remembered weight,

as if the mattress signed a vow to help me simulate.

︵‿︵‿

I lie beside this phantom dip, a shoreline to its sea,

my side an island stacked with books and dim-lit memory.

Your empty pillow storms with you in thunderstorms of down,

and every lightning flash redraws the face I can’t unlearn.

︵‿︵‿

I’ve tried to smooth you into flat, to tuck you into square,

But softness knows the law of you and springs you back to there.

The fabric folds like whispered names that won’t submit to dust,

and in that crease the night stacks up its fragile kind of trust.

︵‿︵‿

Your ghost is not out clanking chains through castles made of bone;

It’s teeth marks on the midnight glass that prove I’m not alone.

It’s coffee stains on paperback, your sock behind the chair,

The faint, apologized cologne still leaning in the air.

︵‿︵‿

I’m haunted by the mundane ways your echo shares my house—

the chair that pulls itself askew, the too-quiet of the mouse.

Yet every haunting has a hinge where grief gives way to grace,

And mine begins the moment I stop reaching for your place.

︵‿︵‿

One day, I’ll wash the sheets and find the outline doesn’t stay,

The pillow learning present tense, the dent worn down to day.

I’ll slide it back against the headboard, smooth, anonymous,

and let the ghost lie down at last inside what’s left of us.

︵‿︵‿

Until that morning, let it rest, this softness shaped like you;

I’ll share the bed with what has been while learning something new—

to keep my half of kingdom warm, to breathe through what is hollow,

and make a little peace each night with the ghost on the other pillow.