I'm in love with the ghost of a woman.
The ghost of a woman who is very much alive.
Who haunts me
not with her presence
but with her absence.
Not with her words
but with her silence.
A silence I fill with my own words.
Speaking and shouting
into the remarkably empty
chambers of my own heart.
And so empty
is this heart
that it produces echoes—
finally too loud to ignore—
reminding me that
the true spectre I fear,
yet must come to accept
(no matter how
beautiful),
is repeatedly created
less by the health of my hopes,
and more by the sickness of
my expectations.