A letter arrived with no return address

How fitting for a life so poorly signed

It read like a threat but felt like a gift

From someone who once forgot to mind

A smile from a stranger costs me my peace

So I hide in bookstores and unswept cafés

Their eyes are knives, their silence louder

Than anything I've failed to say

So don’t pretend you miss me now

You only liked me half-dead anyhow

I was never your type—just your phase

A charming corpse for lonelier days

And if I vanish, well, no alarms

No headlines read “He Meant Some Harm”

The world keeps turning in borrowed arms

While I go gently, if not grandly

[chorus] (final, bleak reprise)

So don’t rewrite me into your pain

I was never yours to lose or gain

Just a footnote in your better phase—

A name you half-remember, half-erase