I think I’m forever meant to be someone’s almost.
The one they almost dated,
almost chose,
almost stayed for.
A name that lingers
just long enough to ache
and then dissolves
before it means anything.
I am the pause in their sentence,
the hesitation they never explain,
the version of love
they decide they don’t want
right before it begins.
I learn people by heart
only to be forgotten in pieces.
a laugh they can’t place,
a memory they don’t revisit,
a ghost that never got to die.
And somewhere,
in all the lives I almost lived,
I am still standing in doorways
that were never opened,
holding tight to a future
no one stayed long enough to live in.
