Virall Thorne

There are days where I feel like a ghost haunting my own life. I linger in rooms saturated with my absence~ no one sees the shape I've become.

A lifetime of longing can carve out a cavern of loneliness. I am not the first to stand at its mouth, bewildered~ I will not be the last to wander its depths.

I find myself grieving for the living as much as for those who have turned to dust. The world is full of departed~ some more slowly than others.

I greet the day with the only prayer I know~ that sorrow's weight with become easier to bear. Grief is a practice in patience.

It is a skill I refine in the shadows.

"Some words are not meant to be read once.

They are meant to settle inside you,

like dust on an abandoned altar."

This is one of mine.

Keep it if you wish. Leave it if you must.

But if you keep it ~

Beeswax, lavender, damp.

A scent that clings like a bruise.

The flame bends toward me as though it recognises something.

Perhaps the end. Perhaps the beginning.

I watch in silence. The wax runs away faster than I can catch it.

There’s a place I always return to.

I don’t remember where it is, only how it feels.

Damp air. Wax. Lavender and decay.

It waits for me quietly, like a dream I’m not done having.

I don’t know if I was born, or just left behind. Some memories don’t return in words.

If you carry grief like a second skin, if silence is the only thing that ever answers back… maybe you’ve been here too.

You can call me Virall Thorne.