Everything Looks More Honest At Night

Everything looks more honest at night,

Especially by moonlit water.

The city thins into light and longing,

That makes my thoughts grow louder.

I don’t think about you all the time.

That’s the strange part,

I can watch a rom-com and feel nothing,

Heart steady, playing its part.

But when that one song comes on,

Suddenly, you’re everywhere.

Not in front of me, not beside me,

Just threaded through the air.

Like background noise I forgot I memorised,

A frequency beneath speech.

It was loud, inside more than outside,

Like a tide I couldn’t breach.

I kept quiet anyway,

Because for a moment nothing else mattered.

Not your leaving, not my almost confessions,

Not my steady heart that faltered.

Not the way the warmth of your smile,

Spread through the entirety of my being,

Like light finding corners of a room

I didn’t know needed seeing.

This chaos however,

Lives entirely in my head because

My world is perfectly functional without you,

Order intact, composure preserved.

You are probably somewhere ordinary,

Drinking tea, tying your shoes,

Inhabiting a morning that holds your name

And not mine to choose. 

And yet,

You sit at the back of my head,

Like an unfinished sentence.

A clause suspended mid-air,

Denied its consequence.

I wonder if you ever think of me.

I wonder if I wrote to you

Would you write back?

Or let distance distort what was true.

It's chaotic because there are no answers,

Only hypotheses of the heart,

Just me negotiating with silence,

Tearing my conjecture apart.

But nothing happened,

And somehow that hurt most.

Because some places only make sense from a distance,

And maybe we do too.

I remind myself that none of this

Exists outside me.

There is no disaster,

No visible debris.

You left.

I stayed.

And our separate lives continued,

Unchanged, unafraid.

This chaos is private

Unwitnessed

A quiet storm behind my ribs.

I walk those streets alone now,

The bookstore settled into its new skin,

And your absence is neatly arranged,

Between books, chatters and films.

I carry you quietly,

Like a song I don’t play anymore,

We didn’t just say goodbye,

We became less than before.

Liking someone is strange like that,

It doesn’t arrive with thunder or flame.

It doesn’t take over your life completely,

It just rearranges the frame.

It rewrites it slightly,

Shifts the light and view,

Keeps trying, almost politely,

To make every empty space

About you.

Everything looks honest by the water under moonlight,

But honesty isn’t the same as staying.

Some things are meant to be illuminated,

Even as they are already fading.