Ink & Shadows: The Words of Osiris j Reapor

I have never believed in tomorrow.

People speak of it as though it waits beyond the horizon,
a place we are destined to arrive,
but I have lived long enough to know better.

There is only now.

The breath in my lungs.
The rain against the window.
The ache in my chest.

Everything else is memory.

By the time tomorrow comes,
it changes its name.
It becomes today for a moment,
then slips quietly into yesterday.

Tomorrow is a ghost.
A promise that spends its whole life becoming the past.

That is why I think of you.

You are my tomorrow.

Not because you are waiting somewhere ahead,
but because you are the one thing I can never reach.

I knew your laugh once.
I knew the shape of your hand in mine.
I knew the silence that settled between us
when neither of us needed words.

Those moments were real.

Then they became yesterday.

And yesterday is a thief.

It stole your voice from my mornings.
It stole your footsteps from my halls.
It stole the future we built in whispered conversations
when the world was asleep.

Now all I have are fragments.

A song that catches me off guard.
A familiar perfume drifting through a crowded room.
The sudden instinct to tell you something
before remembering I no longer can.

People tell me time moves forward.

I suppose it does.

The calendar changes.
The seasons turn.
The years gather like dust on forgotten shelves.

But you remain exactly where you have always been.

Just beyond my reach.

Just beyond today.

A destination I can see
and never arrive at.

Tomorrow.

And every morning,
when the sun climbs into the sky,
I watch it happen once again.

Tomorrow becomes today.

Today becomes yesterday.

And somehow,

you are still tomorrow.