Literally Speaking

midnight drives down to the beach,

the top down on my red Jeep,

salt in the air and nowhere we needed to be.

I remember the soft way you looked at me,

like the world had finally gone quiet,

but it was just the wind

stealing every thought that wasn’t you.

I remember those early mornings,

when freedom felt effortless.

That was who I was.

Before I learned that loving you

and losing you

and for a while,

I let the heat convince me

I was whole again.

I got lost

in the wanting,

in the closeness,

the beautiful distraction.

Later,

alone in the quiet,

I realized I’d almost forgotten

It cleaned the glass.

Now I can see every crack

That I had finally learned how to live without it.

But some nights get too quiet,

and memory starts sounding like comfort.

So I answered the call again,

even knowing exactly how it ends.

Now I’m sitting with the familiar ache,

wondering why the things that ruin me

charred beams still standing out of habit.

Everything I was is coated in that bitter ash,

that no amount of time can rinse it clean.

There is no place left inside me to start over.

I just keep finding myself at alone with the feeling,

that I was just a lie you told your friends for fun.

I am left in the aftermath,

of this burned and bruised ego,

hardly settling into the shape

of what you chose to leave me as.

And then it hits me.

Even the air tastes used,

like it belonged to you first,

and I am just breathing what you left behind.

when you’ve already turned away from the sound of it,

when the words feel like knocking

on a door you won’t open,

when loving you has nowhere left to go

but stays anyway,

you start to understand

that memory isn’t a one-way mirror.

That maybe, just maybe,

when she crosses your mind,

uninvited, undeniable,

in that same quiet, golden way

and for a second

time forgets what year it is.

The air feels familiar

like a song I don’t play anymore

but still somehow know every word to.

I pass streets that aren’t the same

but my body remembers them anyway-

the turns, the laughter,

the version of me who didn’t know

how everything would unfold

There was a woman back then.

Her voice lives somewhere in the back of warm evenings;

in the space between sunset and headlights,

where everything felt possible

and nothing needed to last.

I was younger

but not smaller

just less aware of deadlines and endings.

Now I drive with a full life beside me-

names, faces, love that stayed.

I wouldn’t trade it,

not for anything

but sometimes

the sky leans just right

the sun presses gently against my skin

and I feel it..

that old, electric ache.

Not regret,

just the quiet wish

to step back into a moment

that never knew it was a memory,

like a secret the world isn’t ready to hear.

The windows fog until the outside disappears,

streetlights smearing into something soft and distant,

like we’ve slipped between moments instead of minutes.

Your hand finds mine

not urgent,

just certain,

like it already knows the shape of me.

We don’t say much.

We don’t have to.

There’s something about loving in small spaces

that makes everything feel larger-

breath louder, skin closer, time slower,

almost willing us to stay.

And for a while,

we exist in that parked, quiet universe

where nothing is expected of us

gravity is just a theory;

that I could step outside of it

if I tried hard enough.

But you.

You are the ocean’s quiet insistence,

the way tides answer a moon

even though they never touch.

I have stood on distant shores,

hands full of other names,

other almosts,

and still felt the pull.

Like a thread stitched somewhere behind my ribs

tightening when I look away too long.

Explain to me

how something can feel like fate,

and absence at the same time.

How do you hold so much of my sky

while leaving me in the dark?

You speak in eclipses;

all shadow and alignment.

Brief moments where everything makes sense

before the light returns

like nothing happened.

And I am left here

full of your gravity,

orbiting a silence

that keeps insisting

I am nothing.

While every part of me

still moves

and the weather of this world-

take the sharp wind in my chest

before it ever finds your skin.

I would be the quiet shore

your storms run out of strength against,

the place where waves come undone and forget their fury.

If the dark came looking,

I’d scatter light like embers in its path,

teach the night to hesitate,

to soften before it reached you.

You would not have to armor yourself here.

You would not have to brace.

I would learn the language of every hurt

on your own tongue,

come home to me.

Not for answers,

not for the weight of what you could have been,

or should have been

Just come as you are,

hands full of broken glass,

heart still beating through the cracks.

I will make room for all of it.

I will hold you

like a harbor holds a storm

without asking it to be calm.

And if every door you find

feels like it might close behind you,

mine won’t.

It’s been open,

a light left on

Fold in on myself,

trace your absence

like a bruise I couldn’t stop pressing.

I waited for the ache

everyone promises-

the hollow, the longing,

the slow undoing.

But nothing came.

Just quiet.

Just space where you used to be,

like a room I stopped needing

before I noticed I’d left it.

They’d say this is what it means-

that something in me is missing,

that softness skipped me,

that I’m built wrong.

Cold.

Cruel.

Maybe.

Or maybe I already grieved you

while you were still here,

learning the shape of leaving

I keep tucked behind my ribs.

It’s not a heart,

nor anything useful,

just something that hums when it shouldn’t.

Mornings arrive like static.

I press my feet to the floor

and wait for the signal to come through,

but it flickers,

cuts out,

returns in fragments I can’t trust.

There are numbers I don’t say out loud anymore,

and a calendar full of quiet X’s

that don’t mean days passed

so much as days endured.

People ask if it’s gone yet

and I nod toward the window

like it might have slipped out

when I wasn’t looking.

But it’s still here,

in the dull glow under my skin,

in the way my body holds secrets

like a locked room

with the key bent just enough

to never turn.

If you saw it,

you’d think it was nothing.

Just a symbol.

Just a mark.

But I carry it

like a language

no one else can read,

the quiet between tasks,

the space beside me in bed,

the seconds I thought belonged to me.

I try to shut it down,

tell myself the truth like it’s enough.

You don’t reach for me,

not in the small moments,

not in the loud ones either.

But wanting you is a tide

that keeps ignoring the shore.

I pull back, it follows.

I build distance, it fills it.

And somewhere in all of that

is the part I can’t stand.

I carry you everywhere,

heavy and constant,

while I am nowhere