The Hollowing

The house remembers you in drafts, in the hum of pipes that learned your rhythms, the floorboard that knows exactly where you step. You are not here, yet everywhere the air holds the shape of your absence like water holds stone.

Photographs fade not from light but from looking— each glance a small theft, stealing one more detail until only the feeling remains, blurred and aching. What dies first: the face or the knowing that the face is gone?

The garden grows wild where you planted order, weeds rising through cracks in the garden bed, the roses no one trained toward the sun. Even the things you touched have moved on, found new hands, new purposes, new forgetting.

I keep a sweater that no longer smells like you, a forgery of comfort. The memory is the ghost now, not you. I live in the space between what was and what I cannot keep, gathering dust like some monument to impermanence.

Time is not a thief—it's a patient hand that opens yours, one finger at a time, until everything you held slips through.