Brie Nicole Inked

Memory returns like breath against glass. Faint, fleeting, gone before I can name it. It does not knock. It seeps. Through the thin places. Through the quiet I leave unattended. A voice. Yours, or something shaped like it, folds into the air, softened by distance, worn down into something almost holy. I reach, but it recoils, dissolves into light and shadow, into the fragile architecture of maybe. Nothing holds. Not the sound, not the shape, not the way it once lived inside me. Only the echo remains—soft, bending, endlessly slipping just beyond the edge of certainty.

It lingers in the marrow of small things. In the hush between movements. In the way my chest tightens for no reason I can justify. A flicker. Warmth, or grief, or something unnamed, passes through me like a ghost unsure of its own existence. I follow it, always. Through half-formed images, through blurred corridors of feeling where everything is familiar and nothing is clear. Memory does not want to be seen. It wants to be felt sideways. Like light through closed eyes, like a song remembered without sound. I try to gather it, to press it into something whole, but it frays in my hands, unravels into something softer, something quieter, something I cannot keep.

And still it hums. Low, constant, almost tender. Not what was, but what remains after time has taken its share. Edges worn smooth. Pain thinned into something breathable. Love, if it was love, reduced to a pulse that barely disturbs the surface. I begin to understand. Memory is not a place I return to, but a sound that returns to me. A distant, wavering echo that does not ask to be followed, only heard.

And I do hear it. In the stillness. In the spaces I forget to fill. A quiet repetition, fading as it forms, forming as it fades. Until I no longer know if I am remembering, or being remembered by something that refuses to let me go.