Ghosts 2

Nought gold where your hair was;
Nought warm where your hand was;
But phantom, forlorn,
Beneath the thorn,
Your ghost where your face was.

(Autumn, Walter de la Mare)

They slip close in the dark, stroke you in the loneliness, and whisper to you in the silence. They are the ghosts of your blessed days, the ghosts of your happy moments. So hard to chase away, impossible to forget. They are the memory of people who were dear once but that are just regret now; those people who we wanted to hold with us and that we cannot admit they didn't deserve it. They remind us of our own mistakes but are not able to persuade us that we lost them for that reason. They are a sweet memory turning bitter every day we spend thinking of them. They are the ideal we used to love, they used to be the ideal we love. They are the ghost of the woman who loved us so much to forsake everything else, to end up hating such a sacrifice incarnated now in our flesh. They are the ghost of that girl who fell deeply in love with us but never really loved us, for she loved already something else and there was no room left in her heart. They are the ghosts of people special to us who quit because, in the end, we weren't so special to them.