Ofelia

Among the ghosts inside my closet, you are the one I feel the most. The sweetest shadow, the silent flame, the lingering whisper that calls my name.

I find you waiting in my dreams, woven through forgotten streams. Deep in the chambers of my mind, your scent returns, soft and undefined.

A trace of perfume, a faded tune, a memory beneath a silver moon. I think of you more than I know, more than I admit, more than I show.

Perhaps some pieces of my soul recognized you before we were whole. Before our bodies met in time, some part of you was already mine.

Did you feel it too? Was there a thread that pulled us through?

Is it madness, is it wrong, to keep your ghost where I belong? To hold your name with gentle hands, to miss a heart I cannot understand?

I drew your face with colored light, with pencil strokes beneath the night. Should I have erased the lines I made, or followed the ghost your presence laid?

You were a bird that crossed the sky, a distant song that wandered by. Returning when the seasons turned, when autumn faded, winter burned, when spring arrived, when summer stayed, you were the sun my soul obeyed.

I never learned to read the weather, or tell the changing seasons together, but I knew the skies would glow whenever you came close and slow.

And I knew the rain would fall again when we denied what lived within, when our lips spoke words untrue, while our eyes confessed what they always knew.

Oh God, I feel you moving through me, a restless tide I cannot flee. A beautiful madness, a hidden sign, your ghost forever intertwined with mine.

Who I am hardly matters. I'm nobody special, and I don't write for the five stars on the door. It doesn't matter whether no one, two people, or ten see themselves in my scars.

I've always admired those who live and let others live. You can spot a painter by the clothes stained with color as they walk the streets. You can spot a writer by the ink that won't wash from their fingers.

You, somewhere on the other side of the world, we don't know each other's names, yet we read fragments of one another's minds. I don't know every harbor you've drifted through, and you don't know mine either.

My dear, breathe. All this fame, all this shine, ends up tangled in the severed wires above the rooftops. My dear, breathe. In the end, all that matters is making art with your own hands.

You haven’t met all of you yet.