Backpack in a Bar

I didn’t know you.
Not really.
But I carry the shape of you
like a second spine—
fragile, unfinished,
aching always.

Some songs don’t fade with time.
Some voices
don’t stop speaking
just because the mouth has.
Yours lives in the walls now.
It lives in the broken places.
It lives.

You taught us
how to bleed beautifully.
How to smile through ruin.
How to build cathedrals
from the hollowed-out parts of ourselves
and dare to sing in them.

But even beauty
could not keep you.
Even the love you left
in thousands of aching chests
was not enough
to tether you here.

And still,
we are tethered.
To every line you left behind.
To the ghost-weight of a voice
that shook when it reached for joy.

I press December’s Traditions
like a wound,
like a question,
like maybe this time
the song will end differently.

But it never does.

There is no cure
for the kindness you carried.
No replacement
for the raw grace
of being seen
in the wreckage
and sung through it.

You are gone.
And the world
is less bearable for it.

Some nights,
I whisper your name
to the dark.

And the dark
sings back.