Where We Leave Our Names Behind

There comes a place

in every story

where names no longer fit.

Where the syllables we once wore

like silk

begin to fray at the seams,

and even our signatures

grow unfamiliar

in our own trembling hands.

I remember yours—

not just the sound of it,

but the hush that followed

whenever I whispered it

into the dark.

A name is more than a label—

it is a breath carried forward,

a promise sewn into the fabric

of another's memory.

But time,

patient and unhurried,

sands down even the most

precise of etchings.

Now, your name

sits somewhere

between a half-closed window

and a long-forgotten song—

faint,

fluttering,

not quite lost

but no longer waiting.

There are places

we leave our names behind—

on café tables and train tickets,

on the inside covers of books

we once read together,

on notes folded twice

and hidden

beneath the warmth of a pillow.

And sometimes,

we leave them behind

in people.

I carried yours

in my chest for years,

not as a wound,

but as a map

to a country

I never visited again.

I no longer say it aloud—

but in the hush between

two passing thoughts,

it lingers.

That name.

Your name.

Like a tide returning to shore

long after the ship has vanished.

We spend our lives

leaving traces—

some in ink,

some in ash,

some in the soft ache

of a memory

that never fully learned

how to forget.

And when the last of our names

are no longer spoken,

only silence remains—

patient,

kind,

carrying us gently

into the sea of all

that once was.