A Graveyardfor Lovers

Tell me, what kind of woman makes a graveyard feel like home? How do you make a shattered mirror hold a flawless image?

Tell them how you fed my flaws to the gaunt hounds of my past, how you stitched our souls together, anointed the seam with light, then knotted it with a curse even eternity cannot unknot.

Long before your arrival, I bled the dead into the stone, a vault where echoes wore the names of those who came before.

Some ghosts were vile— deceit with bloodless hands, dark desire stitched into a cheap dress, drunkenness breathing through borrowed lips, love with a curse beneath its tongue.

I buried their remnants with hands split by betrayal, fingers tarred by trust, then sealed each grave. Even mercy dared not knock.

Then came you, ambling through my cursed halls. You woke something unbidden, a pulse I thought dead.

And I, abandoned by heaven, discarded by hell, tore myself from the heresy this world branded into my blood.

You didn't mend me; you unmade the ruin and rewrote it.

I dreamed of us.

Not the staged tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, nor Bonnie and Clyde with sirens at their heels.

Ours is quieter, more dangerous: a love that leaves no evidence, no legend left to lie about us.

I want to watch you become a sanctuary for what comes after us— not born, but summoned; our light, our dream.

When age has thinned us to breath, I want us counting the hollow knocks beneath each other's ribs, your gaze buried in mine, our hands sealed in a covenant death must break itself to enter.

When death slips in without knocking, bury me in my wedding suit— pressed clean, the shirt starched, a corpse dressed for a life ahead.

My Maker must be waiting to see the relic still burning in my chest, the one that carries your name: Anike.

Beneath the grass, where soil presses its weight into me and insects crawl into the hollows of my flesh, feasting, they will taste you—

the wine of your mouth, the litany in your gaze.

The light you left in me will make them pause, wondering at a love decay could not finish, that death could not wash clean, that haunts the grave like a pulse.

They will wonder what you look like, Anike mi.

When I die, write me a love poem. Tuck it into my breast pocket like a secret meant to follow me.

I will carry it through the silence of my grave, read it to my mother in the world that waits beyond, and tell her I found in you the home this world never gave me.

I will wait for you where time is buried and silence snores.