He keeps the room exactly as she left it,
a museum of almost-was:
the half-read book open like a broken wing,
her hairbrush holding three strands of night,
the faint dent in the pillow where her head
learned how to disappear.
Some nights he lies down beside the absence
and tries to dream himself into her country.
He counts backward from a hundred,
slow as rosary beads,
until the ceiling dissolves
and the lake appears again—
black glass, patient, merciless.
She is always there,
but farther out now,
a small white shape drifting on the water
like a lost petal that refuses to sink.
He calls her name;
it falls from his mouth and freezes mid-air,
a thin shard of sound that never reaches her.
He swims.
The water is colder than memory,
thick as regret.
Each stroke pulls him deeper
into the place where love becomes weather—
a storm that has forgotten how to end.
When he finally touches her,
she is translucent,
a girl made of moonlight and goodbye.
She presses her palm to his cheek
and it passes straight through,
leaving only the chill of almost-touch.
You came, she says,
voice soft as moth wings against glass.
I never left, he answers,
but the words come out as bubbles
that rise and burst unheard.
She smiles the way lakes smile
when they have decided to keep someone.
I died happy, she tells him.
Don't waste your living
trying to follow.
Then she leans in—
not to kiss him,
but to breathe herself out of him,
a slow exhalation of stars
until he is empty and buoyant
and beginning to sink.
He wakes gasping,
sheets twisted like ropes around his ankles,
the taste of dark water in his throat.
Dawn is a bruise-colored line at the window.
He understands now:
she is not waiting on the other side of sleep.
She has become the lake itself—
vast, quiet,
holding every drowned wish
he will ever make.
And still, every night,
he returns to the shore of the bed,
closes his eyes,
and walks back into the water
willing to drown a thousand times
if it means one more moment
of her impossible, luminous hand
resting weightless against his sinking heart.