How to Be Nobody

I don’t know
why I am nobody.
But you do.
And that
is why
I am nobody.

You never said it.
You never had to.
The absence of your word
was louder
than my presence
and any name I might have had.

You looked through me
like a ghost
who hadn’t yet
earned the right
to haunt.

You taught me silence
not as peace
but as place:
a corner,
a shadow,
a room left out of the house.

And I stood there,
half-formed,
half-heard,
wondering if breath
could count
as presence.

What was I
but the echo
of your indifference?
A body shaped
by what you would not touch,
a name
you never bothered to forget.

Now when I speak,
it’s only to ask
if I am real
enough
to vanish.