Shape Of You

I never stopped knowing the shape of you.
Not just your face,

but the way you existed against me,
how your breath would falter right before it synced with mine,

how your silence said more
than most people's confessions ever could.

You didn't just leave,

you stayed in the marrow of me.

Time didn't take you away.

It just taught me how to carry you
without trembling in public.

But alone, in the dim, honest hours,
you still happen to me.

I still feel you in phantom ways:

in the space beside me that no one fills correctly,

in the way my hands hesitate,

as if they remember a body they were built to understand.

No one has ever learned me,
the way you did,
like you were reading something
you had written yourself.

Maybe that's what ruins me most,

that with you,
I wasn't performing,
wasn't guessing,
wasn't translating my heart into something acceptable.

I was just, known.
Do you understand what that does to a person?
To be seen that deeply and then returned to the world like nothing ever touched them?

I have tried,

God, I have tried,

to unlearn the gravity of you.
But every version of love since has felt like an imitation of something my soul already recognizes as real.

I don't want to remember you anymore,

I want to feel you again.

Not in memory,
not in softened, romanticized fragments,
But real, present, undeniable.

I want your voice breaking against my name,

the way it used to sound like it belonged there.

I want your hands certain, familiar,
not asking, not doubting,
just returning.

I want the quiet after, when the world would fall away
and it was just us existing like something inevitable,
like something that had always been
and always would be.

Tell me,
does it haunt you the way it haunts me?
Do you ever wake up reaching,

certain I was still there,

only to be met with absence, so sharp it felt personal?

Because I am still here,

not in the same place,
not the same person,

but still yours in a way.

I have never been able to undo.

And if there is even a fracture
in the life you've built without me,
even the smallest opening.

I would come back through it
 without hesitation,
without pride,
without pretending I didn't break when you left.

I don't want closure.
I don't want peace.

I want you,

in the raw, unfinished,

dangerous way
that never really let me go.