The Ghost of Our Almost (#1)

April 1913

The light faded slowly tonight. Not abruptly, but in that soft, deliberate way it does in early spring. The kind of light that makes everything look older. I found myself lighting the lamp before I meant to, then forgetting why I’d done it.

I was brushing my hair when I thought of you.
Not the kind of thought one chases, the kind that arrives, fully formed, without permission.

You.., the man I never claimed.
The one I could never call mine.
The one I almost let ruin me.

There are names I say aloud and names I carry in silence. Yours has always been the latter. Tucked behind ribbons. Folded into half-dreamed conversations. Left unwritten in every letter I never dared to send.

We were never really lovers. Never publicly scandalous. We existed in the elegant margins of the acceptable. A shared glance, a hand offered just a second too late to be necessity. And yet somehow, you linger more than those I loved openly.

I remember you in pieces:
The way you tilted your head when I said something sharp.
The quiet patience with which you let my charm unravel.
How you never reached for me, but never looked away.

It wasn’t love. Not in the way people mean.
It was hunger pressed into lace.
It was a future imagined too vividly to ever survive the present.

There is a memory I never speak of, not even to myself, unless the room is very quiet: the night we stood in the corridor outside the drawing room, both of us pretending not to notice how close we'd become to doing something irrevocable. You reached for the door, not for me. And I wanted to thank you. And I wanted to scream.

You loved me at a time when I needed to be chosen.
And I.., I loved you like a secret. Beautiful. Heavy. Unclaimed.

I am someone’s wife. A man of manners, of means. A man who has never once read the expression on my face and asked what I wasn’t saying. He does not haunt me. But you do. Even now.

Not like a wound.
Like an unfinished sentence.

You were never mine.
But I remember how close you came to being.

—L.B.

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