Heartbeat’s Last Echo
by Dawg
The room is a tomb, still and hungry, every object a relic of when love lived here–
silence breathes in the walls, thick as smoke, and I find myself suspended between
the impulse to scream and the certainty that no one will answer.
The last of your scent lingers, stubborn, on the pillow,
a ghost that refuses to leave, a memory that rubs raw against my skin.
Even the bed–once a fevered country of tangled limbs–now betrays me,
its emptiness more intimate than any embrace, the cold spot beside me
a geometry of loss, the curve where your body used to curl and sweat and sigh.
I reach out in the night, but only air fills my hand,
a mocking stand-in for the touch I once took for granted.
I try to speak your name, but my tongue folds around it like a wound,
the syllables dissolving before they escape,
another secret between me and the darkness.
Every breath is an accusation: how dare I go on without you?
The sun still rises–obscenely bright–spilling light over absence,
illuminating the nothing that now occupies the space where you once stood.
I walk the apartment as if it were a museum of grief,
each object annotated by your absence, each mirror reflecting what I cannot repair.
Even your laughter–now just a ghost in the corner of memory–
is sharper than any pain, crueler than any bruise.
I hold onto the smallest things: the indentation in the couch,
the way your toothbrush still sits next to mine as if waiting.
Love didn’t die; it calcified, settled into bone and sinew,
a slow poison that colors every hour,
a quiet violence that bleeds me from within.
Friends say it will fade; they whisper cliches as if words can mend
what’s ruptured beyond all stitching.
I nod, smile, make coffee, wash the same plate twice,
but nothing penetrates the numbness, the stillness,
the certainty that nothing will ever be as it was.
Sometimes, at three in the morning,
I swear I can hear your heartbeat–faint, stubborn–
somewhere inside the walls or in my own ribs,
a reminder that love, once alive, never really dies.
It just becomes another kind of haunting.
I keep breathing, not because I want to,
but because my body doesn’t know how to stop.
Your name is a prayer now–one I say with lips closed,
fearing that to speak it aloud is to admit you’re truly gone.
Pain is my inheritance; loss, the language I speak
in the hope that somewhere, you can hear me,
in the hope that somewhere, heartbeat answers back,
if only in the space between one breath and the last.
Love remains, but so does pain,
and I am left to live where both will always reign.