There’s a ghost in my glovebox, a lipstick tube, half melted. You left it like a relic, like a war bride leaves a locket on the neck of a lover she can’t bury right. I wore Sunday dresses with the hems torn, bones thin as matchsticks, thighs red from your belt buckle's sermon. You called me "sweetheart" like a curse, like an old American sin that still pays rent in the church pews. My daddy died with a cigarette smile, and you tasted just like him— bitters and cornfields, rotgut and rainwater poured into the wrong glass. **[Chorus]** Still I loved you in that Tennessee way, all bible verses and bar tabs, the flag half-mast in my chest. You were the hymn I hummed while tying a cherry stem with my tongue, watching you gamble God’s mercy in the backroom of a Texaco. **[Verse 2]** I traced your name in powdered sugar on diner tables at 3 a.m., while waitresses with bruised ankles gave me free coffee and told me to run. You smelled like penny matches and apologies, drove like the Depression never ended. You said heaven was a highway and hell was a hometown you could never quite leave. **[Bridge]** There’s a photograph of us in the glovebox— you, shirtless and reckless, me in a borrowed sadness and a coat that didn’t belong to either of us. I tried to write you out in cursive, but my hands forgot how to spell surrender. **[Chorus]** Still I loved you in that Tennessee way, with my mouth full of psalms and my pockets full of ash. You were the radio static that made silence feel holy. I was the girl with a funeral in her throat, singing for men who’d already left. **[Outro]** And if they ask what happened to me, tell them I married the wind and buried my name in the garden. Tell them I kissed a man who mistook me for mercy— and he wasn’t all wrong.