Climate of Being Forgotten
I have become the ghost in the hallway of your own life,
pressing my ear to the wood grain,
listening for the laughter that used to have my name in it.
But it’s just a murmur now, a language I’ve forgotten,
spoken between strangers who wear my old faces.
And I have learned the particular cold of the other side of the door,
the side where the draft from a forgotten window
seeps under the frame and pools around my feet,
where the hinges never squeak for me anymore.
My hand, translucent as a forgotten promise, hovers,
not to knock—never to knock
but to trace the outline of your shadow as it passes.
Tonight, you paused. Right here.
I could feel the warmth of you bleed through the wood,
smell the rain on your coat and the distant, dying smoke
from the fire I used to build.
Your breath hitched, a tiny, broken rhythm,
and for a heartbeat, the space between us was thinner than glass.
You leaned in. I leaned in.
And through the grain, I saw your eyes—looking right through the space I filled.
You were searching for something. A sound you thought you heard.
A ghost of a feeling. A glitch in the silence.
But you didn’t see me. You saw the wallpaper peeling at the corner,
worried about the lock, about the leak in the attic.
You are haunted by repairs, by the living world’s endless small decays.
And I am just the silence between the floorboards’ creaks,
just the reason the air feels heavier at this spot.
Now your footsteps retreat, back towards the kitchen,
back to the clatter of spoons and the hiss of the kettle,
back to the strangers waiting at the table.
I hear them ask, “Everything okay?” and you lie, “Yes, just a draft.”
You pour four cups. There are only four of you now.
My cup, the chipped one with the faded bluebird, is in the back of the cupboard,
gathering dust behind the good china,
a relic in a museum no one visits.
And I remain, a portrait without a frame, a word stuck in the throat of this house.
I have become the ache in the walls, the reason the lights flicker for no reason,
the keeper of keys that fit no lock you have left.
I will spend eternity listening to the murmur of my replacement,
and wondering if the cold I feel is the season,
or just the permanent climate of being forgotten in a place
that was once the only home I knew.
F