A Note Before We Step Across the Threshold

 If Ballad of a Dying Lover is the moment the heart stops and silence falls, then Ballad of the In-Between is the echo that refuses to fade—the charged pause where grief rearranges the furniture of the soul. It is the liminal hallway between last breath and first acceptance, where memories glow like embers and every doorway offers a different “what if.”

In this second movement, we linger with the questions that survive the funeral:
What happens to promises with no one left to keep them?
How does love sound when it’s talking to itself?

Here, time stretches, folds, and occasionally fractures. The living bargain with ghosts; the dead barter with echoes. Guilt and tenderness sit shoulder to shoulder, passing the same candle back and forth.

Step softly. The floorboards creak with stories not yet told, and the air is thick with half-spoken farewells. But keep walking—because it’s only by inhabiting this uneasy middle that we can turn the page toward release.

Welcome to the hush between heartbeats: Ballad of the In-Between.

Ballad of the In-Between

The silence came first—
not peaceful, but paralyzing.
Like standing in a room where
the air has teeth
and memory chokes harder than grief.

I stood beside her,
but I was already a rumour.
She said my name
as if it could resurrect me,
as if she hadn’t whispered it
too many times in rage before.

I wanted to answer—
God, I wanted to.
But the words had nowhere to land.
They hovered, homeless.
And so did I.

Her eyes didn’t widen in horror—
they narrowed,
like someone who knew
the betrayal of absence too well.

This—this isn’t what they prepare you for.
It’s not the dying.
It’s the part where you still feel
but can’t touch.
Where love is a scream
that never hits the air.

I reached for her—
reflex, not resolve.
But my fingers went through her,
and it felt like being erased in slow motion.

She cried in ways
that made me hate being sacred.
And I hated that I couldn’t
ruin the moment with a kiss,
or ruin the silence with a lie.

Still—
I stayed.
Not because I was noble,
but because guilt has a long tether
and I owed her more
than the mess I left behind.

I stayed
until her grief softened
into something like survival.
And then—
only then—
did the light stop waiting.