she lingered .

she lingered.

always in the back crevices of his mind,

she lingered.

he couldn't grasp it,

the thought of her, now worn soft by time,

had become something he called nostalgic.

it had been so long, hadn't it?

so unbearably long since her face was more

than a flicker of pixels,

a ghost trapped behind a screen.

the world had given him other things,

countless things--

vivid, radiant, endless in their brilliance.

yet even amongst those shining moments,

his mind reached backward,

his heart straining against the tether of years,

calling out to the girl who now

lived only in the blurred edges of his memory.

she wasn't here anymore,

not really,

but she lingered.

in the quiet spaces,

in the ache that settled when the world grew still,

she lingered.