I don’t want to be saved from it.

Remembering.

I find you in the hush between heartbeats,
a ghost stitched into the seams of every ordinary hour.

In the phone I refuse to factory-reset,
your messages rise like drowned letters from a shipwreck
“miss you” at 2:17 a.m.,
the little blue heart I still can’t delete.
I scroll until the screen burns my thumb,
and there you are, alive in pixels,
laughing at something I said that no longer matters.

Your black t-shirt hangs in the back of the closet
like a second skin I keep trying to crawl back into.
It still smells of you—
cigarette smoke, vanilla, and the faint iron of your lipstick.
I press my face into the collar at night
and breathe until the dark feels like your mouth on my throat.
Some mornings I wear it under my own clothes,
a secret wound no one else can see.

I hear you in the laughter of strangers down the block
that low, reckless sound you made when you were half-drunk
and telling me the worst thing you’d ever done.
It slices through the city noise,
and for a second the sidewalk tilts.
I turn too fast, chasing a ponytail that isn’t yours,
and the absence punches me square in the ribs.

Even the barista knows the order I can’t stop giving:
oat milk latte, two extra shots,
the one you called “heart-attack in a cup.”
She slides it across the counter with a smile
and I taste you in the bitter foam—
your mouth after you’d kissed me too hard,
the way you’d lick foam from my lip like a promise.
I drink it black now.
It still burns.

You live in the static between radio stations,
in the perfume cloud left by a woman I don’t know,
You live in the dreams that leave me gasping awake,
reaching for a body that’s already cold on the other side of the bed.

I am in love with a haunting.
I keep the lights off so I can feel you better.

I don’t want to be saved from it.

Let the messages rot.
Let the t-shirt fray.
Let the laughter fade into traffic.
I will keep finding you
until the dark itself starts answering back