Please—no songs, not now, not ever.
Each melody slices through the quiet,
Reopening the seams of what might have been,
A whisper from a life left unfinished.

The music drags me back, unwitting, unwilling,
To moments trembling on the edge of change—
Words caught between heart and lips,
Hopes so fragile they never took shape.
Lips that hovered, so near yet untouching,
Haunted by all I dared not confess.

Pride loomed large; doubt seeped in like dusk.
I stood – paralysed by my own defences,
Waiting, wanting, yet never brave enough
To breach the silence that lay between us.

There were friends, nearly something more,
And one—always that one—
Who might have been my gravity, my home.
But I remained distant, glimpsed and overlooked,
Afraid to speak, to risk, to reveal—
Left only to wonder if they ever sensed
The quiet ache behind my careful, yet longing, gaze.

And oh, the longing lingers still:
To have been the one they turned to in their solitude,
The name they typed when the night pressed in close,
The message they waited for, sleepless at 3 a.m.
But I was only ever the passer-by,
A face in the crowd, a silent shadow—
Hoping, foolishly, for something never mine to claim.

And so I remain—tethered to the weight of the unsaid,
Suspended in the hush of all that never was,
While the world keeps humming its cruel, familiar tunes.
And I—
I beg for silence.