Step one:
Burn the old letters.
Set the paper alight, watch the ink curl into smoke.
Sweep off the ash,
but the words still hang in the air.
Step two:
Clear the house of everything you touched.
Box up the cups, the boots, the photographs.
Throw them into the ocean —
but the ocean coughs them back like driftwood.
Every wave is your laugh.
Every wave, the same laugh.
Step three:
Fill the bathtub with sand.
Sit there, knee-deep in it,
thinking the weight will squeeze the memory out.
You shake the sand from your hair —
but it’s all just fragments of your name.
The sand that sticks are the pieces of you
I can’t scrape off.
Step four:
Grow flowers in the kitchen.
Tear up the linoleum, let the dirt take over.
But every flower blooms in the shape of your face,
and no matter how fast I pull them out by the roots,
they grow back,
like an apology I didn’t want to hear.
Step five:
Put salt on your tongue and wait.
Wait until the taste of you dissolves —
but salt tastes like tears,
and now I can’t tell if I’m swallowing the sea
or swallowing you.
Step six:
Stop sleeping.
Forget how to dream, maybe that’ll do it.
But then you start showing up
in the spaces between blinks —
an afterimage burned into my eyelids.
I press my palms into my eyes,
but you’re still there.
Step seven:
Build a bonfire in the middle of the living room.
Throw everything in —
the couch, the curtains, the whole damn house.
But the flames never reach you.
You’re in the corner, watching.
You were always in the corner.
Step eight:
Give up.
Let the memory take up residence,
let it eat out of the fridge and leave its clothes on the floor.
Give it your name,
because at this point, who’s who anymore?
It sits at the table,
sipping your coffee, reading the paper.
Slip out the backdoor,
quietly, before it notices you’re going.
Created by a human with AI assistance.
© Subcreation.design 2024. All rights reserved.
