We held the silence like a mirror cracked between the two of us, each shard reflecting some part of the day we promised would not die. Your laughter, folded in the corner of the room like a photograph forgotten in the glove box, and my hands, tracing the outline of the things I wished I could fix. You said the streetlights looked like the ghosts of city dreams— every flicker a muted “why,” every shadow a left‑behind promise. We walked past the shuttered storefronts and I counted the cracks in the sidewalk — the way little fractures let the light bleed inside. We fell apart in the same pattern that wallpaper peels from a damp wall— softly at first, then tearing freely, edges curling, revealing the raw plaster of what was always underneath. I watched you try to press yourself back into the frame of us, and I watched the frame refuse to hold any more weight. Do you remember the terminal of tears? When your hands clutched my coat like they were trying to stop the plane, and the loudspeaker called your gate, but you couldn’t look at me, so I memorized the curve of your shoulders and how they shook when you walked away. I found your fingerprint in the condensation on the window one morning, an imprint of your presence in the fog I couldn’t clear. Our voices echo‑tracked through the hallway of memory: the door that never shut, the apology never spoken, the heartbeat outside the rhythm of our room. If time were a river I’d have jumped into the current and let it carry me away, but you were the one already sinking, lungs filling with the sediment of regret. And I reached out to pull you from that water, but the rope I held was fraying, and I realised the water wasn’t cold—just patient. In the end the photograph in my mind crumpled — your face blurred, the laughter faded, the streetlights dimmed to nothing but a memory of warmth. We are the sum of the things we lost and the things we tried to save. And if this was the story — two people collapsing into the same space and finding no foundation left to stand on — then let it be written. Paradise Lost.
-Ysu
