Ghosted
I keep rereading the last line,
like it’s a door I can still open
if I touch the handle the right way.
A sentence.
A smile in punctuation.
A normal goodbye that wasn’t a goodbye.
Then—nothing.
At first it’s small,
almost polite.
A pause that could mean busy, tired, distracted,
anything that doesn’t bruise.
So I become generous.
I rewrite your silence into excuses,
build you a life where you’re simply
caught up in the weather of your days.
I check my phone without deciding to.
I carry it like a pulse.
I refresh like prayer—
not holy, just desperate.
And the confusion is the worst part,
how it makes a person bend.
I search for the moment I “ruined it,”
turning memories over like stones
to see what crawls underneath.
Did I say too much?
Too soon?
Not enough?
Was I warm in the wrong way—
or not warm enough?
I start editing myself retroactively,
as if the past is a draft
and your disappearance is the red pen.
But hurt has its own math:
If I mattered, you’d have said so.
If I didn’t, why did you hold me
like I belonged here?
Ghosting is such a clean crime.
No fingerprints.
No argument to point at.
Just an empty chair
where someone used to sit.
It makes the heart do stupid things—
like knock on a door
that has already become a wall.
I picture you reading my name
and choosing not to choose me.
And that’s the personal side of it—
not the missing conversation,
but the quiet decision
to let me wonder
if I was ever real to you at all.
Still, I’m learning:
your silence isn’t my autobiography.
I don’t have to earn an ending
from someone who won’t speak.
One day, I’ll stop rehearsing
the messages I never sent.
One day, I’ll stop calling it mystery
and name it what it was:
absence,
disguised as power.
And I will grieve you properly—
not as a person who vanished,
but as a lesson:
that someone who wants you
won’t make you chase echoes
through empty rooms.
They’ll stay.
They’ll answer.
They’ll be human.
And I’ll choose that
over a haunting.