Time keeps happening.

Not passing—

happening.

Like a mechanism that forgot why it exists but refuses to stop.

Tick without sound.

Shift without meaning.

A forward that does not ask permission.

You are gone.

No—

not gone.

Removed. Extracted.

Like something essential lifted out of me with surgical indifference,

no anesthesia,

no closure of the wound.

The sky is wrong.

Too blue.

A violent kind of blue.

It stretches above everything like a surface that should break but doesn’t.

People walk under it as if it’s stable.

They are intact.

I am not intact.

Birdsong leaks into the air—thin, repetitive, unbearable.

Each note lands where something used to be and finds nothing to rest on.

Sound with no receiver.

Meaning with no anchor.

I keep expecting—

something.

A rupture.

A siren.

The ground to admit what has happened.

But the sidewalk holds.

The light turns green.

A car door shuts somewhere with complete conviction.

Reality continues to insist on itself.

Inside:

Not emptiness.

Not silence.

Pressure.

A collapse that does not finish collapsing.

An implosion paused mid-event, held open,

so I can feel every fraction of it.

Pieces of me hover.

Not falling.

Not returning.

Just—

unattached.

I reach for you the way a body reaches for a missing limb.

Automatic.

Unthinking.

Phantom you.

Phantom warmth.

Phantom gravity.

My hands close around a shape that isn’t there

and still

somehow

hurts.

Time drags me forward by the edges.

But something in me is still there—

at the exact point of severance—

looping,

stuttering,

refusing translation into “after.”

There is no after.

There is only this:

A world that continues flawlessly

around a break it does not contain.

And me—

misaligned,

partially erased,

still moving in appearance only—

haunted by the outline of what kept me alive.