The anatomy of a distance that never healed You once said the skin remembers more than the mind And I laughed, not because I disagreed But because I knew it was true in ways I could never confess Long after the night ended After the rain washed the windows clean After the sheets cooled and the mirrors fogged over My body kept circling you like a slow orbit Around a planet that refused to show daylight There are places on my chest That never learned to close Not because you wounded them But because you opened them too carefully Gentleness is its own kind of damage It makes departure unbearable It makes absence feel authored It makes a goodbye sound like a negotiation I never knew how to talk about intimacy Without turning it into investigation Measuring the temperature of your silence Tracking the pulse in your wrist Counting the seconds between your breaths To see if I still existed inside them You made anatomy emotional You made longing scientific Some nights the city hums in my ribs And I swear I can feel your hands Aligning bone and sorrow With that slow precision, you never apologized for You traced me like a map you were afraid to finish As if closing the route would make the journey real I keep thinking touch ends when the hands leave But touch lingers longer than language It stains timelines, contaminates memory Turns every future body into comparison material I hate you for that I thank you for that Contradiction sits comfortably between my shoulder blades Where you once rested your thoughts There are hours I can't account for Moments lost between headlights and crosswalks When something invisible brushes against me With just enough weight to feel intentional Sometimes I think it's you Sometimes I know it's just the past Relapsing I learned it's possible to miss someone Without liking who you were with them I learned pain can be slow Like an instrument warming up before the performance We were always performing Even naked, even whispering Trying to sound like people who knew What they were doing We didn't We were improvising with borrowed oxygen To this day, when I shave I pause at my collarbone Because that's where you paused Every single time As if there were something sacred hidden there That only you were allowed to touch I don't believe in gods But I believe in rituals And you became one by accident You're not here anymore But I still adjust my breathing To the rhythm you left behind Goodbyes don't erase touch They archive it Some archives we never learn to close