The Fog

She wanders now
through a landscape unlit by memory,
a place where the air itself conspires against her—
a fog so thick it devours the ground beneath her feet,
erases every landmark,
every door that once led her home.

I call her name into that silence.
It drifts like an echo into nothing,
vanishing before it can find her.
And yet—
sometimes,
just sometimes,
her eyes lift as though she hears.
A flicker, fragile and fleeting,
like a candle guttering in the wind.

I run to her across that invisible distance.
I extend my hand—
and she takes it.
Her fingers curl around mine,
familiar, beloved,
still carrying the tenderness that raised me,
the steadiness that once guided me.
For a heartbeat,
I believe.
For a heartbeat,
I imagine dragging her back through the veil.

But this is not a mist that burns away with dawn.
This is not weather.
It is permanence.
It is the unyielding architecture of loss.
The fog does not lift;
it tightens.
It swallows her step by step,
pulls her further into its endless corridors,
and no strength of mine can undo its grip.

And yet—
I feel her.
Oh, I feel her.
In the faint quiver of her hand against mine,
in the stubborn drum of her heart—
a rhythm that answers my own,
beating, beating,
even as the world forgets her name.

Her spirit is still inside this storm,
a bird beating its wings against glass,
unseen, unheard,
but alive.
And my own chest aches with the knowing:
she is lost,
but not gone.
Not yet.
Not while that small defiance remains.

So I stay.
I stay though I cannot guide her out,
though I cannot scatter this merciless shroud.
I stay because love does not leave.
Because love refuses retreat.
Because love means holding her hand
even as the fog steals everything else.

And when the day comes—
when the fog finally claims the last fragments,
when her eyes no longer flicker,
when even my name dissolves
from the fragile architecture of her mind—
I will still feel her.
In the echo of my heartbeat,
in the hollow she carved in me,
in the endless ache of remembering
for the both of us.

She is lost.
But she is not gone.
She will never be gone.
Not while I remain to speak her into the silence.
Not while I keep my hand in hers,
even when she cannot feel it.
Not while love,
stubborn as dawn,
refuses to surrender to the fog.

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