Once you reached for me like I was the only shore. Now your hand stops short, like the water’s already risen. I kept every promise you forgot to keep. Swallowed the quiet lies so the nights stayed whole. And still you look through me when I speak your name. Trust used to live in the unasked questions. The way you’d turn toward my voice without thinking. Now it comes only when the silence gets too loud. Like a debt I have to pay again each time.
I carried your shadows in my lungs. Let them settle where the light used to be. Smiled through the hollow so you’d stay. But the more I held, the less you stayed to be held. Somewhere between your leaving and my staying, the thing we called us learned how to lie. Not broken. Just careful. Like glass remembering the fall. I keep reaching even as the ground learns to give. Even as the door I kept open starts to look like the one you walked through last. And I wonder how long a heart can keep beating for someone who already left the room.
Fading shore…
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