Tag Archives: ghost of love

The Wanton’s Lament ©️

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I was born in a valley that never forgets a voice. Every cry, every prayer, every lie—it all settles into the folds of the mountain. My mama used to say, a woman’s heart ain’t her own till she’s too tired to use it, and I think she was right. I learned early that love and pain came from the same hand, that men could bruise you without meaning to and still say your name like it was a promise.

When I got pregnant the first time, I thought I’d finally found what women like me were built for: a man to stay, a child to hold, a place in a story bigger than my own. But he left, and the house filled up with ghosts of what could’ve been. The silence grew teeth. Meth found its way into my bloodstream like mercy disguised as lightning. It made me weightless, careless, quick. For a while, I believed I was flying. But meth don’t lift you—it digs. It hollows.

When they took my baby, I didn’t fight. The woman from the county had kind eyes, and that made it worse. She called me sweetheart as she buckled my daughter into a seat that wasn’t mine. I watched them drive away until the dust turned the road into smoke. After that, I didn’t need much of anything. Just a place to sleep, a way to stay numb, and enough money to make it to the next day. The men came, and I let them. It was easier that way. Call it survival, call it sin—it all paid the same.

But once—just once—there was a man who looked at me different. Not hungry, not pitying, just seeing. We didn’t talk much. He touched me like he was afraid I’d disappear, and for a few hours I believed I could start again. I let him all the way in because I wanted to keep a piece of that gentleness, something living. When he was gone by morning, I didn’t cry. I just lay there watching the light move across the ceiling, thinking maybe that was how love was meant to come for women like me—brief as a breath, gone before it could rot.

Now the nights stretch long and slow. I walk the edge of town where the neon hums and the road smells of rain and oil. I still see his eyes sometimes when I close mine, that quiet steadiness like he saw the woman I was when the mountain took me. I carry that look like a small ember in my chest. It don’t light the dark, but it keeps me from freezing all the way through.

Sometimes She Forgets ©️

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The connection between alcohol and love, once cast in mythic gold, has a darker side—a side soaked not in romance but in ruin. For while the drink may unlock the heart, it often blinds the eye. It confuses want for worth, lust for loyalty, and thrill for truth. What begins as a liberation can end in entrapment, like a siren’s song luring a ship toward rocks just beneath the surface. Alcohol makes promises it cannot keep, and love born in its shadow often turns brittle by morning.

Metaphorically, this pairing is not a dance but a duel. Alcohol hands you a sword with no grip, and love dares you to fight with it. You swing wildly, drunk on potential, slashing through your own boundaries and illusions. But in the sobering light of day, you discover that you’ve cut yourself more deeply than anyone else ever could. You mistook chemistry for connection, body heat for soulmate warmth. And when it’s over, you aren’t just heartbroken—you’re hollowed out, wondering if any of it was real.

For some, this cycle becomes addictive. The chaos of love mixed with liquor becomes a kind of ritual sacrifice: you offer up your clarity, your safety, even your dignity, hoping for one more night that feels like meaning. You keep returning to that temple of illusion, drinking from the same poisoned chalice, hoping it’ll turn to wine again. But it doesn’t. It never does.

And then there is the fatal metaphor—not just the death of a romance, but the slow spiritual decay of the self. When love is always sought under the influence, it never quite touches the soul. You forget what sober love feels like, what real intimacy looks like. You come to believe that connection only happens in the haze, that the only way to feel close is to be far from yourself. In time, this belief erodes the heart, corrodes the mind. You become a ghost of your own longing, chasing phantoms in the dark, mistaking every kiss for salvation and every silence for damnation.

So yes, alcohol and love may be dramatic lovers in myth, but in life, they are often tragic. Together, they can conjure ecstasy—but more often, they conspire to destroy what’s sacred: trust, clarity, self-respect. And what is left, once the glamour fades, is not romance but wreckage. Not a story—but a warning.

The Girl Who Never Came ©️

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I built a place in me for her—long before I knew her name. Stone by stone, silence by silence, I shaped the waiting like a cathedral and called it hope.

But she never arrived. Or maybe she did—wearing someone else’s voice, someone else’s wounds. And I missed her while trying to recognize a dream too fragile to survive translation.

I left lights on in every room of my soul. I wrote invitations in every breath. I made my anger polite, my sadness poetic, my chaos a story with structure. Still—no one came.

I listened to other men speak of women who ruined them with beauty. I envied them. To be ruined is at least to be touched. I have been weathered only by absence.

I have loved the outlines of possibility so long, I forgot how to touch something real without comparing it to what never was.

So bury it here. Bury the myth. The girl who would understand without asking, who would lean in without testing, who would see me without scanning for threats I didn’t create.

Let the dream rot back into the soil. Let the chapel collapse under its own loneliness. Let the quiet finally mean nothing except silence.

And if she ever comes—late, weathered, wrong key in hand—let her find nothing waiting. Not out of cruelty. But mercy. Because I’ve already grieved the life we never had.