Scribble

Is this yearning worth it, when the distance between mine and your hands is grief? What good is longing, when the thread between us is stitched from sorrow.  Not silk, not hope, but through unraveling ache? I reach, but my fingers find ghosts of you. You exist in the in between of not really gone, not really mine. Still, I wait. Still, I ache. Still, I call into the hush between us, as if grief might listen,  As if distance could fade away. We are not lovers. We are not strangers.  There is no name for what we are,  Only the weight of what we aren't. You speak with your eyes,  I answer with silence,  because words would make it real. There is a sadness in how we don’t touch, What if the world might fall apart if we ever did. I wonder, if I crossed this silence, would the ache, this wait, this endless suffering end? Or are we beautiful only because we never became what we could have?

with every burn, every smoke is it a regret of the chest? Is it a dead man's wish or a birth of a phoenix from the ashes.  With every puff, every smoke inhaled i am a different man. The flickering of lighters,  not just flame, but a ritual, a confession, a war. With every puff, every breath drawn in, I burn a piece of who I was. A different man exhales,  older, darker, sometimes freer, sometimes more chained. It is not the smoke that stains my lungs, but the memories carried in it. Carried by the echoes,  a laugh I lost, a name I shouldn't have forgotten, a promise I never meant to keep. I talk to the fire. I tell it my sins, and it listens like an old friend, quiet, crackling, hungry. They say smoke rises,  but so do ghosts. And maybe I’m both: the man I was, and the man I’m becoming. Both rising, both fading. So don’t ask me why I light another. It’s not my addiction. It’s not my weakness. It’s ritual. It’s not death. It’s the price of becoming who I have to b...