"The Echo of Almost"

I liked you once,
in the quiet of Year 2,
when my thoughts were simpler
but my heart was already deep.
You smiled like gravity,
and I let myself fall
into the kind of crush
that doesn't leave,
even when time does.

And still now-
after laughter with friends,
after seasons and birthdays and
half-healed versions of myself-
you show up,
like the ghost of a song
I can't forget the melody to.

Not because you asked me to remember.
But because something in you
refuses to be forgotten.

It hurts
in the softest way.
Not like a wound,
but like a word
I never got to say aloud.

You liked other girls.
Not me.
Her.

She is everything the mirror says I'm not:
lighter, sharper, more contained.
And when I dreamt of you beside her-
her laughter like glass,
your smile like fire-
I woke up
with a name lodged in my throat
that wasn't mine.

I know I'm not what you think about
when you stare at your ceiling.
I know my name
doesn't replay in your mind
like yours does in mine.
And that truth-
that unbearable, unshakable truth-
follows me like a shadow
on sunless days.

You never looked at me that way.
But you didn't look at anyone that way, either.
And somehow
that made it harder.

Because it means it wasn't about someone else.
It just wasn't me.

Still, every year,
your name makes the list.
Uninvited. Unannounced. Unchanged.
A ghost with your voice.
A memory with your face.
A question with no answer.

How do you forget someone
who never really belonged to you?
How do you let go
of what never held on?

You don't.
Not all at once.

You just learn
to carry it quieter.
To feel it
without feeding it.
To let the name
be just a name-
not a wish,
not a wound,
not a weight.

And maybe one day,
your name won't echo.
It'll just pass-
like a leaf in the wind,
soft and unremarkable,
falling from the branches
of a tree I no longer climb.