Do I Ever Cross Your Mind?

I wonder, in those fragile, blue hours before the world wakes, if the ghost of my name ever catches in your throat. It is a quiet, haunting curiosity—not the kind that demands a recovery, but the kind that drips like slow rain against the glass of a soul. I find myself tracing the outlines of a life we once inhabited, navigating a map of "us" where the ink has bled into the paper, and the landmarks have been reclaimed by the wilderness of time.

To love you was to dwell in a house of mirrors; to lose you was to watch it shatter into ten thousand jagged reflections. Now, everywhere I turn, I see a fractured version of what we were. I am anchored to a shoreline you’ve long since abandoned, watching the horizon for a ship that I know, with a cold and steady certainty, has found a different harbor.

The poet Rumi once whispered through the centuries, “Only from the heart can you touch the sky.” But what happens when the heart is weighted with the lead of an unspoken goodbye? What happens when the sky is just a vast, hollow canvas where I used to paint your face? I am left wondering if you still carry the gravity of me, or if you have learned the art of breathing without the scent of my presence in the air.

There is a specific, visceral pain in realizing that I might be a forgotten melody to you, while you remain the entire, deafening symphony to me. I see you in the slant of the afternoon light; I hear you in the rhythmic weeping of the city rain. It is an exhausting devotion, this habit of seeking you in a world that you no longer occupy with me. I have become the silent curator of a museum that no one visits, guarding the relics of our laughter and the fossils of our late-night promises..

"The heart was made to be broken." — Oscar Wilde

If Wilde was right, then my heart is finally fulfilling its destiny. But he forgot to mention the dust. He forgot to mention how the fragments cut the hands of anyone who tries to pick them up—including mine. I am bleeding from memories I refuse to cauterize. Is it the same for you? Or have you found a way to heal that leaves no scar, no trace, no memory of the fire?

I think of the way we drifted—not a sudden, violent shipwreck, but a slow, agonizing leak. We watched the water rise around our ankles and pretended our feet were just cold. Now, an entire ocean lies between us, and I am shouting into the gale, asking the salt and the wind: Do I ever cross your mind? Or am I just a shadow you outran when the sun finally broke through the clouds?

The Japanese speak of Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, turning the flaw into the masterpiece. I tried to mend the crack you left with the gold of my longing, but the pieces refuse to hold. Some things are not meant to be repaired; they are meant to be mourned. As Warsan Shire hauntingly reminds us, “You can’t make homes out of human beings; someone should have told you that.” I made a home out of you, and now I am a nomad in my own skin, wandering through the hallways of my mind, tripping over the furniture of our past. I don’t wish to be a burden on your conscience, nor a thorn in your new garden. I only want to know if, in the middle of a crowded room or the hollow silence of a Sunday drive, the thought of me ever strikes you like a sudden, uninvited fever.

I am not asking for a return to the "before." I am simply asking for a sign that the "after" isn't entirely empty. I am writing this to the version of you that still lives inside me—the one who hasn’t learned how to leave yet. I leave this question suspended in the ether, a paper lantern tossed into a dark, indifferent sky:

Does the memory of me still ache, or have I become just another star you’ve stopped wishing on?