ghostlights

You smolder in the silence,
a fire long starved but still alive in embers,
its warmth is just enough to keep me waiting—
waiting for the storm to crack open
and flood me with more than your distant light.
But all that comes are echoes,
faded remnants of what might have been
if you could stay.

I reach out to the fracture between us,
fingers tracing the lines where promises cracked,
where words unraveled into hollow gestures.
You come and go like a ghost,
haunting the spaces between my thoughts,
leaving behind only the worn edges of what we were,
never fully here, never fully gone.

I hold onto the embers—
the only proof I have that something once burned bright,
though now it withers in the cold air
of your absence.

How many times have I rebuilt the walls
only for them to be broken by a whisper,
a flicker of you that never stays?
Your presence is a shadow,
an illusion I can’t help but follow
into the same labyrinth of disappointment.

I am tired of waiting for you
to fill the hollow spaces you left behind,
to stop fading like smoke
the moment I reach for you.

But still, I wait.

Even as I unravel
in the emptiness you leave,
even as the distance between us grows,
I wait—
because I am bound to a ghost
that refuses to fade.