The house has learned a new language—
one made of pauses,
of breaths that never quite become words.
It speaks in the creak of the floorboards
where you used to walk,
in the hollow echo of a door closing
with no one left to answer it.
Autumn arrived early this year.
I did not notice the trees changing
until everything had already begun to fall.
Your scent lingers like a ghost
caught between seasons—
faint traces of warmth
on the collar of an old shirt,
in the quiet corners of pillows
that no longer remember your shape.
I press my face into them anyway,
as if memory were something
I could inhale back into existence.
But even ghosts grow tired.
Even they leave.
Now the rooms are shedding you
like branches let go of their leaves—
slowly, reluctantly,
as if each release were a small betrayal.
I find myself unlearning you
in the smallest, cruelest ways.
I wake and reach
for a body that is no longer there.
My hand meets only
the cold, unbroken sheet—
a winter that begins at dawn.
I cook too much food
and stand there, staring,
forgetting how to measure a life
for one.
Your name still lives
at the edge of my tongue,
a habit I cannot quite break—
like a leaf that clings
long after the tree has decided
to let go.
Outside, the wind rehearses loss.
It gathers what has fallen
and carries it somewhere unseen.
I wonder if this is what healing is—
not a mending,
but a scattering.
Not forgetting,
but becoming unfamiliar
with the shape of what once was.
The house grows quieter each day.
Even the silence is changing,
settling into itself
like dust in abandoned light.
And I—
I am learning to walk through it
without expecting your footsteps
to follow.
Still, some nights,
I swear I hear leaves
brushing against the windows,
like soft hands asking to be let in.
But I do not open the door.
Because I know now—
autumn does not return
what it takes.
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