I tried to call you,
but my voice snagged on the empty air.
You were already a silhouette
against the bruised plum of the morning sky,
your form dissolving from the woman I knew
into something else entirely.

Your shoulders softened,
your outline blurred,
you became a bat.
A leathery parchment of a creature
unfurling into the dawn.

They say bats are blind,
but you flew with a terrible purpose,
away from me,
into the liquid gold of the rising sun.

As you receded,
you began to moult.
Not feathers, not fur,
fragments of our life.
Shreds of forgotten promises fluttered down
like black confetti.

A whispered “forever” caught
in the spider’s web by the window.
The memory of your hand in mine
landed softly on my cheek
before dissolving into mist.

You left a constellation of our ruin
in your wake,
a trail of lies and impossible hope
settling on the dewy grass,
the fence posts,
the skin of my outstretched arms.

I stood alone in the waking world,
collecting the beautiful,
useless relics of your departure,
each one a perfect, painful proof
that you were never really there at all.