Salt, Pretending

Image credit: Generated with AI (OpenAI image model)

Suddenly it seemed crystal

A one-eyed fantasy

A door once

Perhaps only the memory 

Hinges breathing in a language she refused to learn

Stood long enough to become

Part of the frame

Ever so often closing

Leaving skin on the wood

Dust learning her name better than she ever did

Somewhere a bell kept ringing

Not for her

Never for her

She answered anyway... again and again

A mistake repeating itself into ritual

Thinking revelation would come

Instead it came as subtraction

Faces erasing themselves mid-smile

Streets folding back 

Into unwalked thought

Remembering 

Leaving

Or being left

The difference dissolved quietly

Salt pretending it was never ocean

Symbols carved behind her eyes

Rearrange when she sleeps

Spelling truths

Waking up

Too human to believe

Someone once told her everything returns

They forgot to mention

Parts that refuse

Fragments that drift 

Unclaimed even by time

Now she carries a map

With no origin

No destination

Only circles

Tightening around a silence

And sometimes

In that almost moment

Before forgetting

Realising 

She was not standing at the door

She was the thing 

It closed on