The attic breathes a scent of paper-skin,
Of cedar chests and promises worn thin.
I found your atlas, bound in faded blue,
The world you charted, creased and worried through.
Your thumb-print, like a ghost, still marks the page
Of some forgotten, sun-drenched, youthful stage.
I trace the ghost, and try to build your face,
To pull the man complete from time and space.
The strong set of your jaw, I think, is there,
The way the light would catch within your hair.
I hear a voice, a phantom in the haze,
That sounds like river stones on summer days,
Explaining tides, and longitude, and wind,
The careful architecture of your mind.
But then a quiet thief begins its art,
And steals the smaller treasures from my heart.
The colour of your eyes, a watercolour washed by rain,
A detail I will never paint again.
The specific cadence of your laugh, when told
A joke that was both silly, sharp, and old.
These things, like shoreline sand, begin to slide,
With the relentless turning of the tide.
I close my eyes and grip the memory tight,
A desperate sailor in the fading light.
I shout your name into the silent room,
To conjure you from this archival tomb.
But what returns is not the man I knew,
Just an idea, tragically untrue.
A sketch in charcoal, blurred and incomplete,
A stranger's echo on a silent street.
And this, I find, is the most bitter cost:
It's not the love, but the beloved, that is lost.
For love remains, a warmth within the bone,
A hollow throne where you once sat, alone.
It is a heavy coat without your form,
A silent harbour, sheltered from the storm,
But with no ship, no anchor, and no sail,
Just the long, lonely moaning of the gale.
I am a vessel of a fading song,
Where half the words I sing, I know are wrong.
I fill the gaps with what I think should be,
And in that act, I lose what's left of thee.
This atlas, with its rivers, roads, and shores,
Is more complete than my own memory's doors,
Which open now to corridors of mist,
Where all the things I can no longer trust exist.
So I sit here, upon the dusty floor,
And do not ask for you to come once more.
For that would be a wound too deep to bear,
To see the truth of what is no longer there.
I hold the map you left me in your stead,
And weep not for the man I know is dead,
But for the cartographer I can't recall,
As his own map crumbles, and the dust takes all.
Poet's Note
I wanted to write about a form of grief that is rarely spoken of—not the initial pain of loss, but the slow, quiet terror of memory fading over time. This poem explores the idea of the "second death," when you begin to forget the specific details of a person you loved. The deepest sorrow, I feel, isn't just that they are gone, but that you are losing them all over again inside your own mind.