Echoes of past shapes
I don’t live in numbers anymore,
Don’t pace the floors I once kept score.
My mornings rise without a fight,
My body stretches through the night.
I move through hours, calm, composed,
Past mirrors where a girl once dozed,
Most days I eat and look away,
And let the quiet guide the day.
But in the thin and fading light,
She sometimes waits just out of sight,
She sits beside me, small and still,
And asks if hunger ever will.
I cannot claim what she once gave,
The sharp, exacting, ordered grave.
The world grew tight, the air grew thin,
A careful cage we lived within.
She whispers through the cupboards bare,
Counts the plates I leave to spare,
She rides the edge of every glass,
And folds herself carefully into my past.
I know the cost, I know the end,
I know she was no faithful friend,
And yet I ache for that strange grace,
The hollow space she used to place.
She walks with me in crowded rooms,
Traces my steps in empty tombs,
She bends the light around my face,
And leaves me wondering her place.
Some nights I dream I let her guide,
Through narrow halls where I once lied,
To be small, silent, almost gone,
To disappear in her embrace before dawn.
Now life runs wild beneath my skin,
Through steady meals and wider din.
And healing isn’t bright or kind,
It is a scar she left behind.
Sometimes I reach, and almost find,
Her hand, just drifting through my mind,
I do not take it, try not to stay,
Yet neither can I look away.
She is not gone, she echoes still
She waits, she bends with all her will,
She curves the rooms, she never ends,
I move through her, she grows through me,
And sometimes I don’t know which one I’ll be.