Beneath My Thumb

I sit here beneath the pale light of my screen, staring at the place where your name used to live.

There were nights when you were always there—

first in the list, first in the silence, first in the small hours when sleep refused to come.

We laughed there. Bled there. Let our grief crawl naked between the lines.

Now there are only days stacked upon days without you.

And your name keeps sinking.

Lower.

Lower.

As if the screen itself has begun to bury you.

New conversations grow above your grave, their little timestamps like fresh flowers laid over old bones, while ours descends into the dark beneath my thumb.

I scroll sometimes just to make sure you still exist.

And there you are—

a name beneath names, a photograph beside a silence, a doorway that no longer opens.

Maybe this is how memory dies.

Not in fire. Not in some beautiful final goodbye.

But slowly.

A little farther down the list. A little harder to find. A little less often searched for.

Until the words we once whispered become digital ruins— messages untouched, laughter sealed behind glass, ghosts preserved perfectly in a place neither of us visits anymore.

The cruelest thing is that nothing disappears.

Every word is still there.

Every confession. Every goodnight. Every moment we almost belonged to each other.

The grave remembers everything.

It is only we who learn to stop visiting.

And sometimes I wonder—

as your name sinks deeper into that cemetery of conversations,

is mine being buried in yours too?

Are we both standing somewhere above the remains of us,

pretending not to hear the dead still typing?