You’re Not Dead, So How Can You Haunt Me?

You’re Not Dead, So How Can You Haunt Me?

You sit there breathing, I hear it, slow, steady, real,

Yet every room bends when you enter, like memory gone wrong,

Your shadow arrives before you, stretching across my floor,

And I feel that cold, the kind that belongs to graves, not lungs.

You answer when I speak, your voice is warm enough,

But something behind it scratches, like nails on sealed wood,

You look at me too long, as if measuring my silence,

As if waiting for me to vanish instead of you.

You are not dead, I tell myself, not buried, not lost,

Yet I wake at night, certain you stood beside me, watching,

Not moving, not blinking, just standing in that corner,

Where light refuses to settle, where breath feels borrowed.

I have seen grief before, it has a face, a shape,

But this, this is different, this is walking, speaking, present,

You touch my hand and I feel distance, not skin,

Like reaching through water that will not ripple back.

So tell me, if your heart still beats inside your chest,

If your name still answers when the world calls it,

Why does my soul step back when you come near,

Why do I feel followed, instead of loved.

You’re not dead, no, that would be easier to understand,

But something of you has crossed that unseen threshold,

And now I live beside a body that breathes,

While something else lingers, learning how to haunt me.

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