Mourning Cursive - A Photograph Faded To Shapes Without Weight

You move like a photograph that’s been left in the rain too long — the colors bleeding into each other, the outlines soft where they used to be sharp. It feels like you’re fading in front of me, a photo left in a window until the sun bleaches the image into nothing but shapes. Now you sit across from me with that distant stare — as if the walls are thinner somewhere else, as if the light is better in another time. You hold your cup the way one holds an heirloom they’re afraid to drop, but I can see the tremor in your fingers, the way your eyes don’t quite land on mine anymore, Drifting to some invisible horizon as if searching for the version of yourself that got lost in the margins. I try to bring you back in small ways. I play the songs you once sang to without thinking. I leave the books you loved open on the table. I talk to you as if you might pick up the thread, but every reply is a little further away, a little fainter, like your voice is crossing a long hallway and losing its strength before it reaches me. Your sentences taper into air, your laughter has the texture of pages turning in a book that’s missing its ending. I want to reach inside and pull you back to the surface — to press my hands against the glass and breathe the warmth back into you. But my palms leave no mark, and the pane stays cold. Now you’re a room with the furniture removed, a melody with half the notes gone, a candle that burns without light. I keep waiting for you to turn and see me, hoping against reason that one morning I’ll wake to find the version of you I knew sitting at the foot of the bed, smiling in a way that makes me believe I haven’t lost you after all. but your eyes are somewhere else, already gone to the place where my voice can’t follow. I’m left holding the shape of you, but not the weight.