You Do Not Exist Anymore

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There are silences that make
their own weather—humid,
thick with the scent
of memory undone.

You were once
the warmest of them:
birthday cards cut like small novenas,
stars glued where prayer might
have been enough.

You were aunt, almost mother,
hairdresser of my sleep.
And now you’ve shed
our name like skin—
you live in Texas,
a place I cannot write to.

I imagine you—white shoes,
a child on your hip
whose name I do not know,
a man beside you
who never had to hear
your past spoken in our
river-sharp tongues.

You keep no page,
no trace,
no digital ghost to haunt.
You’ve mastered the art
of vanishing—
no breadcrumb trail,
no clue to come after.

And so I’ve learned, too:
the grace of forgetting
the ones who forget.

I will not seek you
in photographs.
I will not ask about
your life stitched
in someone else’s surname.

We will grow old
as strangers—
two women who once shared
a name, a room,
the hush of combs
on young hair.

This is my elegy:
no weeping,
no closure.

Only this vow—
that when the body fails,
and silence comes to bury
us both,
I will not reach
across that dark
to find you.