I whisper your name between sips of coffee,
fold you into the linen I hang in the Athenian sun.
Sometimes I imagine your laughter echoing
down these unfamiliar streets,
filled with noise and orange blossoms.

She doesn’t arrive all at once.
She spills slowly –
like warm light across bare skin,
like a petal blossoming
before it falls.

You keep returning
to the room upstairs –
where the wallpaper peels
in the shape of scar tissue.

It broke you –
not with thunder,
but with the sound of a door
that would never open again.

I used to feel him in the air,
in little signs, in everywhere.
A song, a breeze, the way light bent –
it felt like more than accident.

It was as if I had been cast adrift in the heart of a raging storm,
somewhere in the vast Atlantic, where the horizon had vanished.
In the beginning, I fought –
Fought the waves that towered and broke over me,
their weight like a force I had never known.
But no matter how I thrashed, they swallowed me whole.