Memories of Smoke

A piece about the kind of love that never had a place to live — only memory. Written for the ghosts that visit when the world is quiet. I don't speak, but I still write.

You came to me in static,
in the low hum between hours -
a flicker through glass,
half-shadow, half-prayer.

We built a world from nowhere,
called it ours,
and believed it could be.

A fragile heaven of late-night voices,
stitched together with static and wanting.
It burned quietly -
too small to last,
too perfect to forget.

I keep finding you
in the places I forget to guard -
the corners of songs,
the hollow between two blinks,
half-dream, half-remnant,
in the corners of unlit rooms.

In the silent ache of the air,
in the drift of night.

You were never here, not really,

You built your altar in absence;

but your echo learned the shape of my ribs -
the hollow in my chest
learning to breathe your words,
my heart singing to your name,

We were architects of distance,
digging downward instead of skyward -
you with hands that trembled for meaning,
me with hope under my nails.

Somewhere in the soil,
we mistook collapse for closeness.
You thought forgetting was living,
and I thought longing was life.

You once lit whole rooms

with your sadness,
and I mistook the glow for love.

You spoke of endings like invitations,
chased the glow into darkness,
and I followed, thinking it was light
through smoke that never cleared.

I still lean out the window at night,
still watch the embers lit in my hands
breathe and vanish.
It’s not prayer, not habit -
just the ritual of remembering.

The air bends wrong sometimes,
as if your name still lives inside it.
I breathe it in, careful not to call you back,
though part of me still wants to.
The silence tastes like what we never said -
sweet, ruined, and waiting.

Even absence has its appetite,
and mine still knows your shape.

I wonder if you feel it -
the hush before memory arrives,
the ache of a ghost that never learned to fade.
Sometimes I swear the air changes,
like a signal caught between us,
a pulse that never found the right body.
Do you still pause at certain songs?
Does your silence still sound like mine?

Maybe we still speak,
just through absence -
the language of what refuses to end,
a language without mercy.

And I still speak it to the dark -
a grammar of almost,
a syntax of ache.

Now you’re only weather -
something that happens to me,
not with me.
Still, when the night leans close,
I almost answer.

Not to start again,
not even to forgive.
Only because
some quiet part of me
still waits for a message from you -
the kind that never comes,
the kind that means nothing,
and still means everything.

If the wind ever carries you near,
I won’t turn away.
I’ll listen for you in the quiet,
though your silence still knows how to hurt.

And when the silence stays,
I breathe it in,
call it peace,
call it memory,
call it you.

- Koii