Feels like a memory surfacing underwater

Faint, warm, unsettling

I knew the hush before the glare

The steps before the marble air

But now she stalls in winter light

Half a turn, already night

Click, a profile paper thin

A frame that will not let me in

The eyes of a mind I knew too well

Not the face, not the sound

Posed in frame, archived deep

A flicker no one meant to keep

Not folded warm, just kept and sent

Some headlines, record of intent

The papers lead without the crease

But silence widened, flat as seas

Filed, not false, yet not quite mine

No stitching what pains define

Receipts, just docket breath and forms

Fluorescent hum, bureaucrat storms

She dressed her tremor like a grace

China calm on a borrowed face

Chose men that posed like iron gates

Strong in pictures, hollow weights

Rooms would tilt, her smile would set

Gloss on glass, lights angle bent

The papers named me shame and wild

A headline made from someone's child

Father's house of law and glass

Clipped applause as people pass

She taught a smile to act like skin

To keep the louder truth within

I never saw her seam unspool

Only the lesson, look like rule

And now the columns blur and sway

Ink that warms then slips away

Their  sentences don't match our room

A kettle click, a careful gloom

The life she kept, a missing space

Was that love that couldn't stay

Or something nameless in the way

Logged like letters never sent

Or names in tempered glass that bent

Not legend, no, not lies but still

A story that refused to fill

She held a storm behind her eyes

Threaded neat with practiced lies

I held the mirror to the day

She turned, eyes held no gaze

No speeches then, just noon and stone

Heel rail slip, a mask on bone

Steady once, then down the stair

Out of frame and out of air

I stood in water colored time

Blue and slow and almost kind

And knew the question I can't cure

Was it love or was she unsure

I keep her absence folded small

A handkerchief behind a wall

I name the mask she taught to me

Then set it down and let it be

She took a door with no return

The quiet kind that will not learn

Signed her name and left the page

A final silence beneath her stage