my world that never was

I miss a place I’ve never been, a life that lives beneath my skin. A home that has no streets or name, yet somehow calls me just the same.

I long for people I can’t find, whose voices linger in my mind. I miss the days that never passed, the kind of forever built to last.

And isn’t it strange, this kind of grief, to mourn a world beyond belief? To ache for something you can’t explain, to feel its sunshine through the rain?

I wonder if they’re waiting there, if they still breathe that familiar air. If time has stopped the way I dreamed, if everything remains as it seemed.

Perhaps they wonder where I’ve gone, why I’ve been absent for so long. Perhaps the skies are growing dim, and all the stars are missing him— the child who promised he’d return, who left with so much more to learn.

But real life called, and I obeyed, left behind the worlds I made. And now, between here and there, I carry homes that aren’t quite anywhere.

Sometimes a song, a scent, a light will pull me from the present night. And suddenly, I’m standing in the world I thought I’d left within.

Oh, how I long to cross that seam, to step once more inside the dream. Not just to see it, but to stay— to let the years dissolve away.

Yet maybe that’s what hurts the most: I am the child, and I am the ghost. The only bridge between those skies, the only witness to their lives.

And though I know I can’t go back, I follow every fading track. For some part of me still believes that home is waiting past the trees.

I do not long for an imaginary place because it was never real.

I long for it because, somewhere inside me, it was.

And perhaps the cruelest thing about growing up is learning that you can love a world with your entire heart and still have nowhere to go to find it again.