semblance.
Amy He The old playground rusts from disuse. Kids don’t play in the sand, climb the monkey bars, go down the slides like I used to. There is nothing for me here anymore, and yet here I sit, on the creaky swing set as if I’m nine years old again, in the death of autumn and the coming of another barren winter. The cold tries to seep through my skin and finds that there is no more room left inside my body, not even an inch of space where bitterness and sorrow have not taken reprieve. But I feel empty, full of ghost towns and black holes, hearts worn too often on sleeves, words stuck too often in throats. I am so filled to the brim with hollowness that there shouldn’t be any space left for thinking of you. And yet. I try to remember the curve of your smile, the sound of your laughter, the love tucked into the corners of your eyes. I call out through abandoned streets and reach for collapsing stars, hoping for something more than an echo, a dying light. But it’s been so many years, and you are galaxies and millennia away from me now, a stranger in the mirror. One day I’ll wake up and forget you completely, the way life shattered you and made me, a semblance borne of this cruel and wretched world. One day I’ll think back and feel as hollow as I am and doubt that you were ever real to begin with. I wonder what I could’ve said to keep you here, the person I used to be. What I could’ve done to shelter you from this ugly metamorphosis, the slow unveiling of a world you’ve always resided in, and the realization that it has no room for hope like yours. I ponder and pine and whisper my answer into the wind. The trees rustle with laughter, and the sky calls me a fool. |