Below is a poem I wrote based on the prompt 'here again.' It's called 'The Persistance Of What Never Was' and it's the first time I've written poetry in years, let alone published it.
Energy like blazing sunsets inscribes itself across the tender membrane of memory. Your smile was a constellation of promises he nor you understood how to keep.
Time, that patient architect of longing, was all he needed to fall headlong.
How easily he mistook vertigo for love.
Banished from your mother’s arms when you stretched toward adulthood, claiming territory she couldn’t surrender...her rejection etched acid patterns in your eyes.
He hated her for that. Still does. Endlessly resurrecting his pain.
The light dimmed in your gaze as days collapsed into weeks, months, years.
As if someone adjusted a dial within you.
Turning down the brightness until shadows pooled in places once illuminated.
Preteens with teeth became your salvation myth.
Those awkward warriors with metal smiles who offered belonging when home became a geography of absence.
You swore this to him between whispers and midnight confessions, while they saved and devoured you.
You. The fool who trusted.
What would you think, now, knowing he became one of them?
The symmetry would wound you.
If that was how the narrative arc completed, this story would end here.
But grief is never so merciful.
He wishes you survived. But wishes alone can’t reconstruct molecules scattered beyond retrieval.
Here he stands, succumbing to memory’s persistent hauntings.
Your ghost refuses to leave.
It returns in the scent of rain on concrete, in the shade of afternoon light that renders the ordinary mysterious, in the laughter of strangers who sound nothing like you.
You haunt him with relentless grace, the persistent echo that refuses silence, mapping his days with your absence.
Here again, then gone, then here again: the rhythm of loss becoming his pulse.
No matter where he travels, or when he believes the wound has closed, your presence arrives. Uninvited yet essential: blood rushing back to numbed limbs, the painful reminder of continued existence.
When his own ending approaches, your face, frozen in youth’s impossible promise, a photograph never taken but developed in the darkroom of remembrance...
Will be what blurs his vision. Not his life unspooling in retrospect.
But you.
Eternal in your incompleteness.
The story that keeps beginning long after its conclusion.
