your absence will haunt me forever

You see, I carried you for so long that when the time came, I didn’t know where to set you down. So I let you sift through my palms, slipping into the cracks that made me. Now, there’s a you-shaped voice hovering over every thought of mine. An idea or opinion surfaces now and then, and I mistake it as mine until I sit still long enough to hear the timbre of your voice, that I once knew better than my own.

Some days, it’s just a whisper, slipping between the folds of my mind, so faint I almost believe it’s mine. Other days, it crashes through me, uninvited, your voice curling at the edges of a memory, your laughter ringing as though we were still on the phone. I flinch at the way you linger. Lord knows I had hoped to be the one who lingered.

And when your face begins to take form in my mind, I search for a distraction to forget you again. Because I could once recognize you through any door, but now, I’m not sure what you look like anymore. I thought I’d know the shape of you till the day I died.

If this is how I grieve you while you live, I wonder how I’ll cope in death.