Cartography of Forgotten Names

There are people whose names I no longer know,

yet they move inside me like weather —

a certain light on water,

a scent that arrives before recognition.

They live in gestures I repeat without meaning to,

in words I use without remembering where I learned them.

They are the echo behind my laughter,

the hesitation before I speak.

I meet them sometimes in dreams —

not as faces,

but as warmth,

as quiet presences waiting in doorways that never existed.

Their absence does not ache anymore;

it hums, softly,

like a song hummed by someone in another room.

I follow it, but never reach.

If I could map them,

it would not be with roads or rivers,

but with the pulse of recognition —

that flicker of knowing

when something unnamed stirs and I whisper,

"Ah. You again."

These are my constellations of forgotten names:

bright, distant,

impossible to trace,

yet guiding me still.

Perhaps that is memory’s true work —

not to keep what was,

but to let it return as feeling,

as weather,

as breath.

So I carry them like wind,

and when it passes through me,

I do not try to hold it.

I simply close my eyes,

and say thank you.