She walks past me like a cathedral with its doors bolted shut,
her head lifted like a blade catching light,
the sun breaking itself across the sharp edge of her cheekbones.
She does not glance. Not even in the way people do,
half-curious if the ghost still lingers.
I am the ghost. I am a relic. I am the bicycle
left outside in the rain, rusting through another season of silence.
I do not cry anymore. I have learned to ossify.
This is how a person becomes a secret:
First, your name fades from the group chat.
Then the inside jokes — the language you built together like a house —
slips out of use, and finally, the silence comes,
a hungry thing with perfect teeth.
She never said goodbye.
But absence speaks fluently, louder than any scream,
and I have grown fluent in answering back with my own quiet unraveling.
On my birthday, the boy with a reptile-smile
sends me a hollow “HBD.”
It stings, but not like the silence.
She says nothing. Her nothing is sharp.
Did she mean to leave it bleeding?
I see her in everything now —
in moths that waste themselves on lightbulbs,
in the girl across the coffee shop with chipped nails
who orders the wrong drink.
in empty doorways and echoes,
and the flicker of myself in the glass,
tilting my head like she used to,
as if to ask: Was it me? Did I do this?
I say I’ve let it go.
I pretend the idea of us, side by side again,
has dissolved completely.
I no longer braid hope into my hair each morning —
but I miss her still, every single day,
with an ache that settles in the marrow,
refusing to be written out.
What is friendship if not possession of the soul,
a kind of haunting done with love instead of chains?
And what is loss, if not an exorcism
no one agreed to perform?
I loved her like a mirror before I knew
mirrors do not owe you truth —
only reflection, and even that can warp under heat.
She passes by and I become vapor —
lightless, unsanctified,
still burning like a wick that refuses to die out clean.
And God — what did I do?
Why does she vanish me with such surgical precision,
like I am something shameful she had to scrub from memory?
My heart is a cathedral still screaming
through its own ash and rubble:
I’m sorry. Are you still my friend?
Look at me.
Why aren’t we talking?
I walk the ruins of her silence
like they are sacred ground,
still waiting for the kindness
I now understand it will never come.