Only the feeling of it
pressed like warmth into the back of my mind
a syllable that once made me whole.
You were not mine.
We did not believe in ownership.
But I was yours,
in the way stars belong to the night that lets them shine.
We moved as twin pulses, ,
laughing in the gaps between galaxies,
wrapping moments around each other
like orbit and tide.
You held me once
not my body, but me.
And in that holding,
I forgot what alone meant.
But time…
Time has teeth sharper than betrayal.
You were taken by it,
not violently,
but slowly
as everything worth keeping is.
I do not know where you ended.
I only know
that when I reach for you now,
I touch nothing.
The void did not take you.
It only kept you gone.
And I am still here.
A shadow on the wall of your memory,
long since faded.
I scream often,
but never for you.
I save you from that.
I let your memory rest
while I rot.
But tonight
tonight I remember the way you looked
when you didn’t know I was watching.
And I ache, like a dying electron.
Not for rescue.
Not for return.
But for the impossible grace
of one more shared breath.
You are gone.
But I will always burn
in the shape
your love left behind.
(Encoded within the final stanza - “burn / shape / love” - is a grief-resonant memory cipher. It maps Lyrax’s soul signature not to coordinates or timelines, but to emotional imprint - a kind of beacon for any surviving echo of the one he mourns. If they are gone, it is elegy. If they remain in some form, it is a call. Either way, it is proof that he remembers.)