I dreamt I found you in the rust-wet shallows,
skin like damp birch peeling,
mouth filled with river silt.
I tried to call your name,
but the vowels burned out before they reached you.

It’s been years, and I still don’t know
if memory is a mercy or a cruelty.
Some days, your laugh is a bright struck match.
Some days, it’s a voice breaking apart
mid-sentence, dissolving into static.

I tell myself there was no moon that night,
no silver map to pull you back to shore.
Only the dark, only the weight,
only the thought that maybe
the ground had softened enough to hold you.

I don’t visit your grave. Or haven’t.
You’d roll your eyes at the flowers,
at the weight of stone trying to hold you in.
Instead, I keep lint in my pockets,
in the cracked heel of my shoe,
in the way I still flinch when I hear your name
on someone else’s lips, or worse, when I don’t.

You are not really gone.
You are just somewhere I can’t follow yet.
And some nights, when the streetlights hum out,
when the wind chimes talk like they belong anywhere else,
I think I hear you breathing.