After the Ending

How we still talk about what has already ended

We speak as if something 
is still arriving, but the door 
has already closed on the sound 
of your name.

The room remembers you 
more precisely than I do,
how you leaned into corners,
how your silence gathered like light
on the backs of chairs.

I have misplaced the moment 
it ended—not lost, misplaced,
like a key set down in a life 
I no longer live.

There is no edge to point to.
No clean incision.

Only this:
the way everything continues
without permission.

Even now, while writing this
I find myself saving things for you:
a line I almost understood,
the last warmth of a cup
I did not finish.

As if the ending were a rumor
we could outwait.

But it has already passed through us,
quietly, taking the weight of every future 
tense with it.

What remains is not absence.
It is a shape that insists on being held,
and the strange, unearned knowledge
that we are holding it alone.