All Tomorrows Haunted By Your Ghost

It has been 22 years, and still, he lives in my dreams. 

I can close my eyes at night and see his face as vividly as if no time has passed at all. His smile, his eyes, the way he looked at me in a way that made me feel like the only person in that world. 

I wake up drowning in the memory sometimes, like I’m underwater and struggling to reach the surface. Each dream is heavy, pulling me back into what could have been. What should have been, 

Sometimes the dreams are tender. We are walking side by side, laughing, touching, whole again. 

Other times they are bittersweet, as if he is just out of reach, watching me with eyes full of something unspoken, before turning away. 

And then I wake, aching, and clutching the ghost of him. My heart pounds with longing that I can’t shake. It lingers in my chest all day, like a bruise I can’t stop pressing.

I tried to mend it once. I reached out 13 years ago, desperate for some sort of closure, or maybe a spark of recognition that what we had mattered. 

Instead, he told me never to contact him again. Like I was the serpent that wrapped the thorny vines around our hearts. That rejection crushed me. Gutted my entire being. It wasn’t just a door closing; it was like a wall being built higher and thicker...... locking me out of a place I once belonged. The devastation of it still echoes, and yet my heart refuses to let go. I can't stop the dreams. 

What torments me most is how much I want him to speak to me. To see me. To acknowledge that we existed together in that fragile, beautiful time. I carry this hole in my heart like a wound that never healed properly, raw and aching for his voice, his presence, his forgiveness. Or maybe just his acknowledgment that I exist. Maybe to prove to be he is flesh and bone and not a phantom that I conjured up. 

It feels so unfair that he can walk away, while I am still bound to him in dreams, tethered in the deep waters of memory and longing. Each night I fall asleep, I wonder if I’ll see him again, if his face will appear to haunt me or to comfort me. And every morning, I wake up hollowed out, reminded that in reality he is gone, and he refuses to acknowledge me, like I never etched out a piece of his own heart and took it with me, 

Somewhere far beyond this world, I sit in silence, just wondering,

-J.C.