Ghost to Yourself

A Poem by kaileigh922

You ring all of the tears out of the shreds of mangled cloth

The memory is unsettling, exposed whenever you try to move on, and your hands are torn up, callouses will form, you sweep your palms across the cement, hot from the afternoon so intent on making happiness just a word, foreign to this town, to your touch

Pain sears through your chest and you are disembodied, no longer tied to the earth in which she walks. Her beauty thickly coats the back of your mind, intoxicating you with conceptions that can no longer be made without the agonizing images constantly flashing through you, and like a ghost, you cannot touch them, cannot feel emotion in them match anything alive inside yourself.

And it’s because your heart beats mechanically, you breathe because there’s nothing better to do, and the world spins around the sun because it has no other choice, caught in orbit around what we all worship.

She was your sun; she was your gravitational force pulling you into something much bigger than the continuous, steady beats of your heart.

But one night, you walk away from dreaming of her, and you think that maybe, just maybe, there’s something else, some other way to be happy. Ten shots down and you’re feeling good, better than missing her…and for a small hour, your conscious leaves you, your morals are decapitated, and you are just a body.

She sleeps in her bed, dreaming of marrying you while you give away every ounce of faithfulness and commitment you’ve promised her, for one night spent with a girl with no face and no name.

You once had balance, orbiting around the one true person who’s made you believe in yourself, made life so much more than breathing, the one person who allowed you to discover the piece of yourself that can never belong to you again…the piece that was replaced by a piece of herself, like a puzzle piece in your side. You will never be whole again, and neither will she, but you both will be changed. And you threw your sun into a plastic bag, suffocated love, for a night spent under a blank, meaningless sky.