Anatomy of an Exit – Riptiva Roy

You are a master of low frequency hums,

those vibrations that foretell fracture

long before the glass shatters.

I don’t need to open my eyes to know that

one heel is already silvered by the porch light, 

tasting the gravel of the driveway 

while your shadow sits beside me.

To know you is to breathe through a filter

expecting the particulate of ash 

in a room you swore was empty.

I am a scholar of your sudden silences, 

reading the warnings etched into the drywall

where you leaned but never settled.

The ink is thick. Iron-dark. Still warm.

Drying into a map of 

everywhere you are about to go.

You are a structural impossibility

a bridge that refuses to touch either bank. 

And I, the fool who tried to calibrate the wind, 

bending my own geometry into unturnable corners,

Splintering, to hold a frame

that couldn’t even carry itself.

Contaminated. The filter has failed.

The air is thinning. 

I will walk away 

from catching ghosts by their throats.