Leaving On Ghost trains Across New York…
We were too young to speak carefully about love,
so we spoke about records instead,
cheap wine, downtown lights reflected in puddles,
how every city after midnight starts pretending
it understands lonely people.
You wore denim jackets with cigarette burns near the cuffs,
always smelled faintly of smoke and winter air,
and I remember thinking
this is the kind of person novels warn you about.
But nobody warns you when they are also kind.
Nobody tells you that the dangerous ones
sometimes hold your face like it’s fragile.
You found me during one of those years
where I felt misplaced everywhere,
like an old coat thrown in the back of somebody’s closet,
still carrying warmth nobody intended to come back for.
And you laughed,
put your hand on my shoulder,
looked at me like I was still worth choosing.
I believed you.
Back then we survived on almost nothing.
Streetlights.
Late trains.
Coffee after midnight.
Your heartbeat underneath my ear in tiny apartments
while the city rattled outside the windows like loose change.
That was enough.
We thought suffering made us profound,
thought being young and reckless
was the same thing as being immortal.
So we kissed in parked cars,
danced badly in bars full of strangers,
turned scars into stories because stories sounded prettier
than admitting we were both frightened kids
trying desperately to be unforgettable to somebody.
And I knew things about you early.
The way your silence changed before leaving.
How restlessness lived in you like weather.
How every beautiful thing you touched
eventually became something you had to escape from.
Still, I loved you with the full embarrassing confidence
of youth.
The kind of love that believes returning
is inevitable.
Years later, certain smells still resurrect you instantly.
Smoke on jackets.
Rain on concrete.
The sound of a train leaving somewhere after midnight.
And sometimes in grocery stores or airports
I still catch myself looking up too quickly
because some stranger moved through the light
in the exact shape of your memory.
Funny thing is,
everybody kept saying we were too young to know anything.
Maybe they were right about most things.
But not about this.
I knew you would leave.
I knew you would haunt me afterward.
I knew love could turn ordinary moments holy
before disappearing without explanation.
And I knew that once, for a little while,
you looked at me like I was your favorite thing
in the whole goddamn world.
Bleu de minuit 