Elegy For a Name No One Remembers

I have forgotten the shape of joy.
It used to fit inside my chest—
light, delicate,
like a flame in the hollow of a bird’s bone.
Now it’s gone.
Now, my ribs are just scaffolding
for a house no one built.

Every morning feels like theft—
a stolen breath,
a borrowed heartbeat
in a body that drags itself
through the rituals of the living.
I wake not to live,
but to endure.
To participate in existence
like a ghost applauding a play
he’s already seen too many times.

People say, “Time heals.”
But time is not a healer.
Time is a butcher.
It slices slow and surgically—
cuts memory from muscle,
love from meaning,
you from yourself.
And you thank it,
because you’ve forgotten
what it means
to be whole.

There are days I walk through the world
like a museum exhibit:
“Here lies the girl who tried.”
I smile with precision,
nod on cue,
speak in rehearsed fragments
so no one sees
how loud the silence is
inside me.

My thoughts have become tombstones—
names of dreams
I buried before they grew teeth.
Every hope I ever nurtured
was stillborn.
Every version of myself
I tried to save
hung itself in the basement
of my ambition.
Now, I write eulogies
in notebooks no one reads,
ink made from what’s left of me.

I have mastered the art
of disappearing while staying visible—
a ghost with a heartbeat,
a scream without sound.
And the worst part?
No one notices.
No one ever notices.

They say,
“Seize the day.”
But what if the day is barbed wire?
What if your hands are too bloodied
from yesterday
to hold anything new?
What if you did seize it—
once, bravely, recklessly—
and it bit back
and left you afraid to touch again?

Sometimes I stare at my reflection
and wonder
if I am real,
or just a fever dream
of someone lonelier than me.

There is no thunder in my sadness—
only fog.
Only the slow, choking weight
of minutes that don’t matter,
of voices that don’t ask,
of mirrors that don’t lie.

I don’t want rescue.
I want recognition.
To be seen—not through,
but into.
To be understood
without having to translate
my agony
into palatable metaphors.

I am tired of making my pain poetic
just so it feels like it’s worth something.

Let it be ugly.
Let it bleed.
Let it rot in the open
until someone says:
“I see you. I know this hurt. I’ve lived here too.”

Until then,
I am a fading note
in a song the world stopped singing.
And all I ask
is that when I vanish,
someone
remembers
I was once trying
so very, very hard
to stay.