Telling The Moon What I Couldn’t Tell You

Every star a thought I swallowed

[cassioveya]

Poems are allowed to blur their edges,

but I will not hide behind metaphor —

I want these words to stand bare,

so you can understand,

and I can witness the truth of my own hurt.

I have come to a quiet realization:

I have lost you.

Not to death —

but to distance that breath still cannot cross.

My father still walks the earth,

yet the father I knew

and the child I was to him

have faded like a photograph left in the sun.

You are still here —

but not here for me

the way you once were.

You have grown into a new life,

a new home,

a new father to a new family —

whom I love,

and for whom I have folded my sorrow small

and kept it hidden in my chest

so your happiness would not tremble.

Still, it aches —

to learn that what I believed was forever

was only a season,

already past,

already gone.

[cassioveya]

Distance and time delayed the reckoning.

By all expectation, you should show the years.

And yet here you are —

looking younger than me.

[cassioveya]

No one will ever know

the burden of the shame you gave me.

For the sake of your joy,

I chose silence,

I chose a practiced smile.

Yet behind it,

shame blooms in the dark—

lurking, ravenous,

alive.

[cassioveya]

From a self yet to be:

Love will carve its quiet marks upon your soul,

and only slowly will time erase the paths it made.

Don’t do it.

[cassioveya]

You were the poem

I recited in full—

while you forgot

I was even a line.

[cassioveya]

You were the light I leaned toward,

And I’d still follow it again,

Though I’d burn alone in its warmth.

[cassioveya]

Who am I fooling?

Even if time rewound a thousand skies,

It would still be you, every time, every life.

[cassioveya]

Don’t circle my life through whispers and friends. I’m not a story you get to skim from afar

It stirs something in me I wish would stay quiet, a cruel kind of comfort that still feels like hope

But we never wanted the same things at the same time, did we?

You won’t choose me, and maybe I wouldn’t have chosen you fully either.

Maybe that’s why this ending, however quiet, feels right.

[cassioveya]

You once swore you’d love me as long as stars lit the sky.

So tell me, did the heavens run out of light, or did you simply stop looking up?

[cassioveya]

I’m grateful it was your hand that loosened the grip

—because mine, though trembling, could never let you go.

[cassioveya]

I was silent when you left because make-believe apathy was the only dignity I could claim.

[cassioveya]

You look at me like I’m the life you lost.

But you never chose me.

You only wandered here with someone else’s name on your heart.

[cassioveya]

I live surrounded by memories, and none of them feel like mine anymore.

[cassioveya]

You left, but somehow everything stayed with you.

My favourite songs, the stories I used to tell you, even the food and places I brought you to,

Now they are all yours. They carry your name.

And I’m still here,

In the shell of a life we once shared, trying to pretend they still belong to me.

[cassioveya]

Still at the terminal, arms full of everything you left behind.

[cassioveya]

You haunt me without trying, and I never even left a mark on you.

[cassioveya]

It terrifies me, How much of you still clings to me. Even now, your absence wears your shape. Even silence remembers you. I feel your