u/facetioustaco270

Unmake my name in the shape of your mouth

You always said it like it meant something else

I learned how to bend where your silence would cut

How to starve just enough to be something you’d touch

 

I kept every version of you that you shed

Like scripture rewritten and stitched in my head

You were warmth when you wanted, a god when you withdrew

I built all my prayers just to orbit around you

 

Now I don’t know what parts of me ever were mine

Just a blur in the glass where you drew your design

 

Still

I revisit the rooms where you almost stayed

Like a thief of my own resurrection, delayed

 

I lit every candle you never would see

Let them burn down to nothing that still looked like me

Wax pooling like time that I couldn’t reclaim

Every drop just another way you misspelled my name

 

You said love doesn’t linger, it sharpens, it leaves

So I learned how to worship the space in between

Where you almost chose me, where you almost remained

A half-life devotion I couldn’t unchain

 

Now even in absence you move through my skin

Like a vow I was never supposed to outlive

 

Still

if I carve you out, I unravel the thread

And there’s nothing beneath it but what you misread

Unmake my name in the shape of your mouth

You always said it like it meant something else

I learned how to bend where your silence would cut

How to starve just enough to be something you’d touch

 

I kept every version of you that you shed

Like scripture rewritten and stitched in my head

You were warmth when you wanted, a god when you withdrew

I built all my prayers just to orbit around you

 

Now I don’t know what parts of me ever were mine

Just a blur in the glass where you drew your design

 

Still

I revisit the rooms where you almost stayed

Like a thief of my own resurrection, delayed

 

I lit every candle you never would see

Let them burn down to nothing that still looked like me

Wax pooling like time that I couldn’t reclaim

Every drop just another way you misspelled my name

 

You said love doesn’t linger, it sharpens, it leaves

So I learned how to worship the space in between

Where you almost chose me, where you almost remained

A half-life devotion I couldn’t unchain

 

Now even in absence you move through my skin

Like a vow I was never supposed to outlive

 

Still

if I carve you out, I unravel the thread

And there’s nothing beneath it but what you misread

There’s a space where I should have begun,

but the blueprint burned before it was drawn

no origin story, no fracture to trace,

just absence rehearsing the shape of a face.

 

They swear I’m here, but I don’t align,

every mirror lags half a second behind

like my outline hesitates to agree,

a fraction misread as what should be me

 

I leave no echo in the places I stood,

no dent in time, no proof that I could

just fingerprints fading before they appear,

a life that rehearsed but was never made real.

 

Like silence pretending it once had a sound,

then swallowing every trace that it found.

I left myself somewhere along the way,

and lost what I found before I could stay.