The cold returns
the way you did in my thoughts,
uninvited,
still able to undo me.

Winter moves through the room
with your absence in its breath.
The walls grow darker
because they remember
how you once stood there,
and how you don’t anymore.

Even the light feels unsure,
hovering,
as if it doesn’t want to witness
what I am missing.

The ceiling presses down
like all the words
we never dared to say,
a sky too low
for love to have survived.

This is the relapse:
not falling back into you,
but falling back into the space
where you should have been,
and finding it still empty.