Lope's Thoughts

Down where the crooked hills descend, beneath a moon that will not bend, there lies a cave with teeth of stone, that opens only when alone. No path is marked upon the ground, yet somehow every road is found. The grass lies flat before its mouth, as though something crawled straight out. They say the cave was once a mine. They are lying. There are no tools inside. No lanterns. No bones. Only footprints. Thousands of them. All facing inward. I heard the cave call out my name, but not in a human voice. It sounded like my mother speaking from underwater. Then my own voice answered from the dark. “Come closer.” I stepped inside. The entrance vanished behind me. Not closed. Vanished. The walls were breathing. Slowly. Deeply. Each breath pulled the air from my lungs, and when the cave exhaled, I heard whispers crawling through the cracks. My name. My name. My name. Then something whispered a name I had never heard before. And the walls went silent. I walked deeper. The cave grew warmer. Then ...

I woke up with a raw smile where my tears were meant to be. No one noticed. Morning was busy unfolding its pale machinery, the kettle coughing up ghosts, the windows chewing sunlight, the floorboards remembering the weight of every footstep that had ever left. I stood before the mirror and found my face slightly wrong. My eyes were too quiet. My mouth was bleeding light. There was a smile there, red at the edges, unfinished in the middle, like someone had carved happiness into a door without knowing what lived behind it. I touched it. It smiled harder. So I stopped touching it. Outside, the city had grown wings overnight but refused to fly. Buildings leaned into one another like tired animals. Traffic lights whispered the names of the dead. A woman walked past carrying a jar full of rain, and every drop inside it was trying to become a memory. I wanted to ask her where the sky had gone. Instead, my raw smile answered for me. It said nothing. It said everything. It said: I am fine. And ...

I saw you before you saw me. You were standing at the edge of the silver fog, looking frightened by the silence. I knew that face. Not because I had forgotten it, because once, I looked like you. I had the same eyes that still expected tomorrow. The same hands that reached for doors without wondering what waited behind them. The same foolish belief that life was permanent simply because we had not yet learned how quickly it ends. Then the world let go of me. And I became what waits after goodbye. A name whispered in empty rooms. A shadow that remembers having a body. A voice with nowhere to put its words. A ghost. Do you know what ghosts cry for? Not the living. Not anymore. We cry for the versions of ourselves that never made it here. For the promises we believed until the final breath. For all the mornings we thought belonged to us. For the people who said forever without understanding how small that word sounds from this side. That is why my tears do not fall. They rise. They gather...