(For)ever Gone

I watched the mirrors pale As if they could no longer carry my reflection Rooms dissolved into blue-grey silence And every name I knew Began to sound like someone else The lights stayed on for days But warmth abandoned everything they touched You moved through me like fading winter smoke Not leaving Not remaining I hear your footsteps in empty corridors Like memory learning how to haunt itself Every word becomes thinner now Paper ghosts beneath the tongue Was I ever held here at all Or only borrowed by the dark (For)ever gone Like ash inside the atmosphere (For)ever gone Still breathing somewhere beyond feeling I disappear slower each day Until even grief forgets my face The walls bend inward quietly As if the house itself remembers loss I left pieces of myself in every shadow Now they whisper back at night There is no violent ending here Only the unbearable softness of fading away A gradual surrender to distance A beautiful extinction (For)ever gone Beyond the reach of names (For)ever gone Like light abandoned under frozen water If you still hear me Do not follow I was already disappearing Long before I left