Still Pretends, Still Forgives
And yet, in this space between what was and what’s gone. I ache for the dream that lingers on. For a memory that no longer lives but still insists, still pretends, still forgives.
Still Pretends, Still Forgives
I opened something I had no business touching,
a silence folded too many times to lie flat,
and there it was—soft, uninvited,
the breath of something once warm, now trembling in stillness,
like dust disturbed in a room I vowed never to reenter,
a whisper that shouldn’t have remembered how to speak.
It was not your voice, not really,
but the scent of your absence trying to form language again,
something shaped like closeness, but hollow at the core,
a structure made of longing, not of presence.
What greeted me wasn’t you, but your echo
dressed in the illusions I still keep in the folds of forgetting.
There is a cruelty in remembrance that arrives unannounced,
slipping in like light through a crack you didn’t know was there,
touching places too old to bleed,
yet too sacred to name without trembling.
You were kind there. I was someone else.
We spoke a dialect that no longer belongs to either of us.
And still, in the hush that follows,
I am taken—
not to you,
but to the shadow of a you who once reached toward me
in a way that neither questioned nor promised,
only existed in the pause between two unmet truths.
I do not know if that version of you ever breathed fully,
or if I dreamt you into coherence
because the silence without you felt too violent.
But something of you remains,
stitched into corners of memory that even time seems to avoid,
half-sleeping, half-burning.
And yet, in this space between what was and what’s gone,
I ache for the dream that lingers on,
for the almost-love that never demanded to be real,
for a memory that no longer lives
but still insists, still pretends, still forgives.
It forgives the fading of our names on each other's tongues,
forgives the reshaping of what once felt eternal
into a gentler form of ruin,
forgives even the quiet,
the long and unbreaking quiet.
No one warns you that some memories survive by lying,
by softening their edges until even grief forgets how to wound,
by wearing gentleness like a disguise
so that even your mourning becomes suspect.
But I mourn still,
not for you exactly,
but for the version of myself that believed the warmth,
for the stillness that followed your vanishing
which learned to hum in your key
out of sheer muscle memory.
And maybe that is the most devastating mercy—
that what was never whole still leaves behind a shape,
a residue of nearly,
a ghost of what we might have touched
had we not been so good at leaving things unsaid.
So I carry it.
This ache with no name,
this softness with no recipient,
this memory that lies quietly between breaths,
still pretending,
still forgiving.
— Runnilune.
Thank you for reading, especially if you made it through every line break and pause.
If any of them lingered, or maybe these poems said something you’ve been trying to name, or simply just kept you company for a while—feel free to drop a little caffeine. It helps me write the next thing I don’t yet know how to say. :)