Fugue

You held a photograph like it was holy.

Edges curled with time, colors fading and bruised yellow in the corners.

I wonder how many times your thumb traced the outline of a face that no longer belonged to me. Or ever did.

I watched you once, sitting beneath the flicker of a dying lamp, staring into that flat, unmoving image. Your eyes glassy, rimmed with silence that accumulates over years, dust in a room no one visits. You looked like someone praying. Or mourning.

"You’re not who I remember," you said, and the words floated in the air, the stench of something already dead.

I didn’t have the heart to tell you that memory is a liar. It edits. It softens the brutality. It builds museums from half-formed moments and insists they were real. "Memory flatters the past," I said. But I wanted to scream. You remembered the way you needed to remember, while I suffered in real time. Bleeding out on the floor of our forgetting.

"I changed in the waiting rooms of your neglect," I told you, and it was the truest thing I’d ever told you.

There were whole winters of a love you never noticed.

You kept me like a pressed flower. Flattened, color drained, preserved just enough to forget the scent.

Your love had light, but no heat. It looked beautiful from a distance and warmed nothing up close.

You chose nostalgia over presence. And called it love.

You kept a photograph. I lived the film.

While you stared at stillness, I became a thousand different versions of myself. Burned through phases like letters on fire. There were nights I sobbed until my lungs turned on themselves. Mornings I rose anyway, washed my face in ice water and silence. I pieced myself back together with nothing but instinct and hunger.

And you. You mourn a never was. A version of me that only ever existed inside your need.

You loved like a collector. Selected the pretty pieces. Hung them in the gallery of your mind. Ignored the blood on the floor. Pretended the frame held it all.

But it didn’t.

The photograph didn’t show the way I held myself together when I thought you were coming back. It didn’t capture the moment I realized you weren’t.

Didn’t show the burden I carried in silence, year after year. Didn’t hold the slow unraveling of someone learning to live never being seen.

You say you lost something. But I was the one who buried it. With my hands. With my voice. With years.

You grieve a shadow. I lived inside the dark.

So let this be the epitaph. Not to the love we shared, but the one you imagined. Not to the person I was, but the one you refused to see becoming.

Here lies what never lived. A snapshot. A sigh. A soft lie.

May it haunt you gently.