time will crush my bones until they spell out in chalk the names of all those who linger in my dreams faceless

sadness that sits in the throat like a swallowed key

time is a slow fist closing around the spine

i am practicing the alphabet of my own skeleton on the pavement

where we once drew hopscotch grids with a rock you stole from your mother’s garden

you were so alive then your whole face a lantern

now in the dream you have no face but i know it’s you by the way you don’t touch me

i spell your name in chalk and the wind eats it

i spell it again with my femur dust

time keeps grinding me down to a fine white nothing and i keep writing the same three names

like a prayer

like a wound that won’t scab

the kitchen where you laughed honey-light and barefoot is gone

the house is sold to strangers who will never know we existed there

your mother forgot my voice

my mother still asks about you and i have to pretend you’re just busy

grief that has no funeral, silent like a flatline

just a birthday i still mark on the calendar with a ghost’s highlighter

just the way i still save things to tell you and then remember

last night i dreamed you walked through a door made of my ribs

you were faceless but your silence had the exact weight of your old sadness

the one you carried like a backpack full of bricks

i tried to ask if you still knew the shape of my laughter

but my throat was full of chalk and the words came out white

i woke up grinding my teeth to powder

time is a kind of violence done to memory

it takes your face first then the sound of your voice then the exact way you said my name

like it was a safe thing

now you are a blur in my temporal lobe a fingerprint smudged beyond matching

and i am just a pile of bones on the sidewalk trying to draw you back into focus

but the chalk keeps breaking

the chalk keeps writing the wrong names

the chalk keeps spelling out please come back

ache that doesn’t fade it just calcifies

a second skeleton inside the first

a set of ghost limbs walking through every room we ever shared

and in the dream you are always just leaving

faceless

dressed in the fog of what i should have said

and i wake with my hands full of chalk dust

trying to remember if i ever told you i loved you

or if i just assumed you knew

time will crush me entirely one day

and the last thing written in the dust of my pelvis

will be your name

but by then you’ll have forgotten a different version of me

the one who still had a face

the one who still believed friendship was a permanent architecture

and not a bridge made of breath

and not a face that dissolves in the rain of years

and not a chalk outline of a body that no longer holds the warmth it used to

sadness that writes their names over and over

until the pavement is a graveyard of almosts

until my bones are just a syntax of grief

until the dream releases your face for one unbearable second

and i wake up sobbing bone meal

begging time to crush faster