Where Tomorrow Breathes Again

He walks the quiet corridors of thought,
a boy still haunted by a ghost of fire.
The rooms are empty, yet filled with plans
he once had laid like bricks of desire—
a life with him, a home of laughter,
a map of tomorrows traced by their hands.

He lingers in doorways no one opens,
listens for footsteps that will not come.
The air is thick with echoes of promises,
with words that fade before they’re sung.
He touches the walls as if they might answer,
as if stone could restore what time has undone.

In dreams he still builds the house again—
each window lit with a golden flame.
He sets the table, he tends the garden,
he speaks the future as though it stayed.
Yet morning comes with its cold decree:
love departed will not return that way.

Their ending came with a final grace,
his lover’s gaze no longer alight with want.
The future dissolved like chalk in rain,
and still he clings to what cannot stay—
the dream, the promise, the imagined thread
that bound his heart to a vanished day.

Yet sometimes, in the hush of dawn,
he feels a breath that is not pain.
A whisper stirs, not of the past,
but of horizons he might claim—
a gentler path, a lighter sky,
a place where loss does not remain.

And when the day leans into light,
he thinks of seeds in barren ground.
What if sorrow is only winter,
and spring waits patient to be found?
What if the heart, though torn apart,
still knows the way to bloom again?

He knows that love can molt its skin,
become a gentler, quiet thing—
a friendship tempered, a softer flame,
not the blaze that once consumed his name.
Yet he cannot bear that fragile shift,
for loss still grips like iron chains.

So he speaks in silence to himself:
“Let me reach the shore where release is real.
Let me unclench the hand that holds
a shadow made of broken will.
I do not want to love you still,
yet I do, against my will.”

He longs for the moment when love remakes—
not as a cage, but as a truth reborn:
that endings, too, can grant their gifts,
and hearts may live though torn.