Elegy, Postponed Indefinitely

I was refreshing a page

that was never meant to hold my name

when it hit me.

A different timeline

once felt deliberate,

assembled with care,

then quietly dismantled

by choices small enough

to excuse at the time.

What arrived instead

was not failure,

just a future

I had never rehearsed.

An acceptance letter

from a place I never pictured

when I was younger,

and braver,

and certain I was going somewhere

specific.

I learned then

that time can be misleading.

Four years is not a measure.

It is a subtraction.

A voice that will never learn my name.

A street I will never walk home from.

I kept a chapter open

because it kept me breathing.

Hope is careful like that.

It learns how to look useful

before it teaches you how to hurt.

I thought I was waiting.

I was really remembering.

Somewhere, that life continued

without my body in it.

Close enough to mistake imagination

for memory.

Tonight, it replays

the way the mind does at the end.

Scenes arriving uninvited.

Rooms I never entered.

A version of me

who never had to learn

how to let go of herself.

The grief is sudden.

Heavy.

Everywhere.

There is no one to witness it

because nothing visible has died.

Still, I bury her carefully.

Still, I know I am changed.

Not by what happened,

but by who I can no longer become.

Written: 2025