I wake each dusk.
It is not my choice,
The shiver of air
that remembers me
calls.
The house exhales dust in my absence,
and I drift through its ribs
like an arrow through a wound.
My feet no longer touch the boards,
but I still hear them creak;
the way they did when she ran across them,
barefoot, chasing the glow
of something I could never see.
The hallways have grown longer.
Each night they twist, unfamiliar,
as if the house itself forgot how to hold us.
I retrace the same path,
past the mirror that reflects only her laughter,
past the window that looks into nothing.
She was light once.
A small sun wrapped in the scent of milk and rain.
Her giggle would rattle the walls
like the first drops of a coming storm.
Now that sound moves through me,
a faint chime in an empty throat.
I whisper her name until it unwinds,
And no longer a name but a sound
the void repeats back to me.
Sometimes it comes from upstairs,
sometimes from the garden,
once from beneath the floorboards.
I follow, always.
My hands outstretched,
hoping to touch the warmth that isn’t there.
Hoping to feel her hair again,
fine as candle smoke between my fingers.
But the closer I come, the further she drifts.
I find her toys where I left them;
the wooden horse with one missing eye,
the doll’s head turned wrong,
a book half-open on the lullaby page.
I straighten them, though nothing moves
except the grief that aches beneath my hands.
When I try to weep,
the tears rise, not fall.
They hover like pearls in the air,
unanchored, unsure.
I think even sorrow grows tired
of returning to the same place.
Every night I walk the same path
through this nowhere,
a labyrinth made of memory and loss.
And each time, I hear her again:
that tiny laugh, sharp and sweet,
chiming like wind in a hollow bell.
I call back, “I’m here, darling, I’m here.”
But the void has no mercy,
and her laughter fades like breath on glass.
There is no time, only longing.
No door that opens, no morning that comes.
Just the echo of her,
somewhere between worlds,
and the sound of my own voice
calling into a silence
that never ends.
If I could die again, I would.
If I could sleep, I would dream her back.
But I am caught;
a shadow stitched to her absence.
So I walk.
And walk.
And walk.
Through empty rooms,
through the dark where her laugh once lived.
And though I know she is gone,
burned into the light,
freed from my endless reaching.
I will search the void forever.
Because even a ghost
has a heart that feels
Its aching breaks.
Vennie Kocsis © 1994-present by Vennie Kocsis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0