DANDEMONIUM

We were a story that never made it to paper—
Too holy for ink, too fragile for time.

I held your hand like a secret I could never say aloud,
you looked at me like I was something worth breaking your heart for.

We lived in parentheses,
a pause between the lives we were told to lead
and the life we almost had.
I kissed you like punctuation—
final, breathless, aching with things I couldn’t change.

You deserved the world,
and I was only a country of cracked windows
and locked doors.
You smiled like summer,
but I was always the thunder
that came just after.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love right.
It’s that we loved too right for a wrong time.

Now, you walk in gardens I can’t enter,
and I sit in rooms still echoing your name.
But your scent—jasmine, rain, the warmth of leaving—
it clings to my memory like a hymn.
And when the night gets heavy,
your laugh is the rope I pull myself back with.

You’ll love again.
But I know—he won’t make you laugh in the middle of crying,
won’t guess your thoughts before
you speak them,
won’t make silence feel like music.

I’ll live again.
But no arms will feel like prophecy,
no eyes will rewrite me like yours did.

We gave us up—
but we never gave up
what we were.

Some memoirs are never written.

Some loves never ask to be remembered.
But you—
you are every page I never got to turn.