A House Where Love Never Lived.

She married under a pale moon,

wearing hope like a white lie.

He stood beside her,

already half a ghost.

He carved the word love

with a mouth that never meant it,

and each silence

left a thin red line on her heart.

When she bled in words,

he wiped his hands of her pain.

When she cried into the dark,

the walls held her tighter than he did.

His touch learned her skin,

but her wounds stayed unnamed.

She slept with his body,

and woke up with his absence.

Now ghosts sit where love should have been—

memories, unanswered nights,

and a woman stitched together

by scars he never asked about.

She still whispers into the night,

not do you love me?

but was I ever alive to you?

-Vidhya.