echoes of unsaid Goodbyes ||

The phrase loops in blood, an echo that will not die. He said things that bruised the sky; he walked away with footsteps quick as rumor. Now he moves on like summer moves to town: fast, inevitable, already in bloom. She wonders if she can stitch herself back to what he loved — if forgiveness is a garment that will fit the same as before. Her anger has no edge; it changes nothing. It is only a cold clocked thing, ticking the rooms of the ruined house until the walls remember silence. At night she weeps like someone learning a new language of loss, and sometimes her hands find the old map of scars and trace them like a litany. Her heart, a drum gone hollow, answers with the sound of nothing — numb, but beneath that numbness, a small ember of wanting still, stubborn and fierce. This is not a story with tidy endings. It is a ledger of reasons: the small betrayals, the call he could not refuse, the fights that taught them both to be strangers. It is a ledger with an unanswered line — and she, its keeper, reads it over and over, trying to decide if love should be a lock she can open, or a wound she must let alone. If love is a battlefield, then grief is the field after rain: soft with mud and possibility.