Echoes
These are not explanations.
They are what comes after the silence.
AFTER THE APPLAUSE
Somewhere in me, she still dances,
barefoot, bruised, and buried in silence.
The world forgot her music,
but her spine remembers.
Each flinch, a skipped note in a dying symphony.
Each silence, the hush before a fallen crescendo.
Now she stands mid-twirl, cracked at the knee,
a relic of movement trapped in bone.
A statue in a burned-out theatre,
grace fossilised, applause long dead.
SPLIT
“You should’ve drowned with the rest of the past,”
says the one behind the polished glass.
“You drag your filth through every day,
a stain I scrub, but you still stay.”
“I kept us breathing,” the shadow spits.
“You faked the light. I took the hits.
You smiled through blood and called it grace.
I buried pain you dared not face.”
“You ruin every hand that holds.”
“I bite because you break. You fold.”
“You want to be the ache, the scar”
“I am the reason we got this far.”
They stare through me. They do not see.
But both still speak. And both are me.
One wants peace. The other, proof.
And I live trembling between the truth
of who I was
and what I’ll lose
when silence finally picks a side.
SCENE NOTES
I saw my own blood
from across the floor,
dark and deliberate,
moving without me,
like proof
that something inside me
had already left.
I saw false love
wear real faces,
mouths shaped like absolution,
hands soft as prayer,
eyes bright with promise
but hollow.
All of it ash.
They spoke like oracles
and touched like ghosts.
Nothing stayed.
Nothing held.
That was the first lesson:
not everything that kneels
is faithful.
Some things only learn your shape
so they can leave it hollowed
when they’re done.
That’s how they survive.
They leave
with pieces of you.
THE MISSING RIB
There is a house
my bones ache to remember,
though I have never
stood beneath its grieving roof.
Its walls are built of silences
that hum in my marrow,
its windows shaped
like the absences love forgot to name.
I’ve never seen its door,
but I’ve heard it
swing open in dreams,
the wind saying my name
like a mother who never got the chance.
I search for it
in the breath between songs,
in the pause before someone leaves,
in the way strangers look away
just when they feel familiar.
It is not a place.
It is the missing rib,
the echo of a language
my soul was fluent in
before I was born.
And still,
I walk the world barefoot,
each step
a prayer
to be taken home.
Somewhere inside me,
a door remains unanswered.
And every time I dream,
I knock.
BELLS FOR THE SLAUGHTER
Forgive me,
I keep dropping the halo
for the punchline.
They wanted a muse.
Soft hands. Light.
I brought bells.
I make them laugh
so they don’t see me
slipping out the door.
If this is a costume,
why am I dressed for slaughter
stitched from bells
and bite marks?
The stage lights bleach everything tender.
Up there,
even a prayer sounds like a joke.
So I bow.
Smile.
Take the noise they give me.
By the time the curtain falls,
I’m already gone.
Still clapping.
Still laughing.
No one checks
where the fool went.
“If time is anything akin to God,
then memory must be the devil.”
Because time only watches.
It stands far away,
cold and merciless,
hands folded behind its back
while everything you love collapses.
Time doesn’t touch you.
Memory does.
Memory breaks in through unlocked doors.
Tracks mud across the carpet of your healing.
Sleeps in your bed like it owns the place.
It doesn’t knock.
It claws.
It digs its fingers into my ribs
and pries them open like a gate.
It says,
Look.
Look at the night you begged.
Look at the mouth that lied.
Look at the version of you who still believed in forever.
It doesn’t show me gently.
It shoves my face into it.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Time says: it’s over.
Memory says: feel it like it’s happening now.
And suddenly my lungs forget how to work.
My pulse becomes a siren.
My chest is an autopsy table.
Because memory doesn’t remember,
it recreates.
Same smell.
Same voice.
Same knife.
It doesn’t haunt like a ghost.
It hunts.
It knows exactly where the heart is
and how to reach inside
without killing you,
just enough
to make sure you keep living with it missing.
Because it refuses salvation.
Because it won’t let the dead stay buried.
Because it keeps resurrecting ghosts
just to watch me kneel.
If time is God,
memory is heresy.
If time forgives,
memory keeps receipts written in blood.
And maybe that’s why healing
feels less like prayer
and more like an exorcism,
me on the floor,
shaking,
trying to spit your name out of my mouth
like smoke,
like poison,
like something that was never meant to live inside me.
ALMOST AT DUSK
Love me like a myth:
unproven, impossible,
yet prayed to
by those who should know better.
I’ll be the rumour your bones repeat,
the fire no historian can date,
the soft lie folded into lullabies,
the scar the map refuses to name.
Carve me into the mouths of rivers,
let sailors argue if I was ever real,
teach your children my crooked anthem,
swear you saw me once, almost, at dusk.
