Some timelines don’t fork — they bruise.
— Marginalia, Internal Myth Study.
You arrive like static on wet glass.
Not a ghost. But a glitch. A pulse that remembers what it burned.
The air tastes like ozone, metal, spite.
You look at me and the light flinches.
I call it mercy, but it’s just recoil.
Your calm’s a weapon.
Every breath lands like a gavel.
I hate how clean you make survival look.
You study me like a bad investment,
and I keep talking just to prove I’m still liquid.
You tilt your head. Not pity, just calculation -
like you’re measuring what’s left to salvage.
I thought healing meant control.
You show me it was only delay.
I’ve been breathing like a scar tissue learning to sync.
Then you move - and something inside me twitches.
The hum turns to breath. The light forgets to behave.
Every memory starts bleeding at the edges.
It smells like copper and surrender.
You don’t forgive. You harvest.
You take what I abandoned, polish, wear it louder.
You say nothing, and it still sounds like proof.
I keep opening myself to see if anything’s left.
Every cut whispers your name back.
You’re not the ghost. You’re the upgrade.
When you leave, the air holds its breath.
The silence lingers - thick, heavy, satisfied.
It doesn’t need to speak.
I know which version buried the other.
✏️ Writer Note
This poem started from an image: static on wet glass. Ephemeral but sharp. An interference pattern. A haunting that isn’t quite ghost or memory but something misfiring in the circuitry of grief and recognition.
The poem lives in the same world as the earlier essay - but it’s quieter. Less argument. More recoil. What that piece shouted, this one absorbs.
The static that sticks around once someone leaves.