You tell me you love me,
yet your eyes look past my face,
searching for someone
who lives only in the silence of memory.
Your arms are warm,
but your heart is an echo chamber,
still ringing with the laughter
of a love long gone.
I stand here, alive,
offering touch, offering today,
but you kneel at the altar of yesterday,
faithful to shadows I cannot chase away.
Is it love,
if your vows belong to a ghost?
Or am I only a visitor
at the graveside of your longing?
You say the words,
but I hear the distance,
a man chained to remembrance,
too loyal to the past to walk into the present.
And I,
left holding the ache of almost,
learn that sometimes love
is not enough
to resurrect the living from the dead.
