One Day, Without Your Name

One Day, Without Your Name

One day, I won’t write about you.
Not the ache of your leaving,
Not the way you promised to stay
and left anyway.

One day, these words won’t flinch
When they brush past your ghost.
I’ll tell stories of sunrises, not scars
Of coffee cups, not the cracks you left in me.

I won’t pause mid-sentence, gut-punched
By a memory of your hands.
I won’t taste blood when I write “love”
or hear your laugh in the rain.

One day, I’ll say “thank you” to praise
without tallying the cost
How every beautiful line was forged
in the fire of your silence.

I’ll stop bracing for impact.
Stop checking my phone.
Stop carving my worth
into the tombstone of “we.”

One day, I’ll read this poem and wonder
who I was when you mattered.
Who I became when you didn’t.

And maybe then, I’ll smile
Not for you, but for the girl
Who wrote her way out of the wreckage,
letter by letter,
Until your name was just a word
and not a wound.