The Mistress of My Mind

My chest tightens with every breath,
like a dark hallway refusing to end.
Some unfinished grief, some unnamed ache,
some part of me that still refuses to break.

I sit alone and call the silence peace,
but quiet has a way of making pain increase.
It knows the places I have taught to hide,
the softer truths I buried deep inside.

It knows the rooms I never let you see,
the words that died between your lips and me;
the things I buried, layer after layer,
until the weight of hiding felt like prayer.

I cannot tell what I had kept from you,
from what I hid because I never knew
how to confess the things I couldn’t name,
or speak of hurt without assigning blame.

But grief is strange—it does not disappear;
it learns to whisper softly in your ear.
It waits inside the breath you cannot keep,
and wakes each time the wounded heart falls deep.

And now I cannot tell, however hard,
what I concealed from you, or from my heart;
what I had lost, what I was scared to lose—
or whether I was saving me, or you.

Your love left rooms I cannot fill,
and still, I pass through them at will.
There’s tenderness I cannot place,
a hand that reaches into empty space.

I thought that time would take its share,
would thin your memory into air;
but some things deepen as they fade—
a wound becoming what it made.

I have outlived the loss, not you;
the heart survives what it can’t undo.
And what I cannot hold or name
still lives in me without a claim.

What once was closeness turns to ache,
what once was certain learns to break.
And what I miss is not just you,
but who I was when we were true.

Time has taught me, cruel and slow:
some things leave, yet never go.
You vanished from my arms, not from
the rooms where my heart danced once.

I miss you—though I hate to say
how often it still finds its way
into the smallest parts of me:
a song, a night, a memory.
And sometimes I don’t miss you at all;
I miss the woman I was before
I learned how quickly love can turn
from something warm to something mourned.

If I had been yours to keep,
would all these restless places sleep?
Had you been mine when love was nice,
before the fear, before the time
we lost between a word and choice,
maybe I’d still know your voice
without it stirring something deep,
without waking what I try to keep asleep.

Time ran cold. The clocks moved on,
with no care for what we were becoming, what was gone.
We met, we loved, then lost our way,
while life kept moving, day by day.

There was no thunder, no grand goodbye—
just quieter mornings, and no one asking why.
No single word that ended us,
no clean break to point to and call it loss.
Just less of you, less of your voice,
less of the future we once thought was ours by choice.

And somehow that is what breaks me most—
there was no ending, only something lost.
We were still loving, still holding on,
while somewhere underneath, the certainty was gone.

I cannot tell you when it changed,
only that what felt like ours grew strange.
We lost something neither of us could name,
and I still carry the weight of what never became.

There were half-written vows, words left unsaid,
whole conversations living freely in my head.
Things I wanted you to know,
but some truths are harder to show.

I kept my pride; I kept my fear,
kept every fragile part of me unclear.
I made a shelter of what I concealed,
and called it strength because I couldn’t yield.

Perhaps I was sincere. Perhaps I lied.
Perhaps I loved you, and let the real me hide.
Perhaps the cruelest thing I came to know
was how much of myself I never let you know.

The road says go. I know it does.
I go because the road is there.
I make my days, I fill my hours,
I learn to live with empty chairs.

But some nights, when everything is still,
I am the keeper of the almost—
of what came close enough to feel like ours,
then slipped quietly through the years and hours.
I know there is nothing left to claim,
yet I cannot make the heart call it by another name.
For what we never had, I somehow grieve,
and what I cannot keep, I cannot quite leave.

And then you find me in a dream,
where nothing is as final as it seems.
You’re there, and I don’t ask you to explain,
or make a meaning out of all the pain.
There is no distance, no before or after,
no careful words, no almost-laughter.
I don’t ask where you’ve been, or why you stayed;
you don’t ask what we lost or what we made.
For once, I don’t need to understand
why we let go when we still held each other’s hand.
For one small night, you are simply here—
and nothing between us needs to disappear.

Then morning comes. I open my eyes.
For a second, I forget the lies
I tell myself about being fine.
I reach for you, then remember time.
And there it is—the quiet ache
of losing you again, for memory’s sake.
I lie there longer than I should,
missing something I once thought I could outlive.

If our eyes ever meet again,
I wonder if I’ll ask you when—
when did we stop being us?
Was it fear? Was it timing? Was it trust?
Did we wait too long to say
what might have made us choose to stay?
Or did we both, in our own way,
know there was nothing left to save?

I don’t know which answer hurts more.
That we could have had it,
or that perhaps we never could.
That somewhere there was a door
and neither of us understood
we were already walking past it.
I think that’s what stays with me—
not simply losing you,
but never knowing what we lost.

Memories don’t leave when you ask.
They change their clothes. They lose their past.
They become quieter, harder to place,
until one day I see your face
in someone else’s, for half a breath,
and my whole body remembers what my mind forgets.
I hate that it still can.
I hate that some part of me is glad.

Maybe that’s the space between us—
not love, not loss, but both at once.
A place where I can let you go
and still feel something when I do.
Where I can wish you well and mean it,
then ache because I meant it.
Where I can say I don’t need you
and know that isn’t quite the truth.

So once again, the mistress of my mind,
I gather what is left and leave the rest behind.
I have become very good at carrying on,
at waking up and making the morning come.
But my heart is slower to obey.
It keeps what my hands have put away.

And perhaps I don’t have to call it healing,
or make it beautiful to make it worth keeping.
Perhaps some love is simply this—
something you survive without wanting to forget,
something you lose without quite losing yet,
a door you no longer stand beside
but still, sometimes, look for on the other side.