The Sunset Is Beautiful, Isn’t

Someday, I’ll meet a version of you still made of candlelight and lullabies— before the winds taught you to flicker cold. You’ll be standing in a dream I never finished, wearing the echo of a laugh that once built whole cities in my chest. And I— I’ll carry the ash of your later self pressed between pages of silence. I won’t speak in names. I’ll speak in scars. In the tongue of splinters and ceilings that caved. “She touched me like a promise,” I’ll say, “Then vanished like sleep, leaving the bed of my soul undone.” You— not yet rusted by the future— will tremble in the ruins of what you’ll become, salt gathering in the corners of your eyes like the sea remembering itself. You’ll curse her— the ghost wearing your face— with the rage of a thousand unopened letters, with the tears of a time you hadn’t yet ruined. And I’ll look to the horizon, where everything dies in gold, and whisper, as if it were never about you at all— “The sunset is beautiful, isn’t it"?