My hometown still knows me.

It keeps my name under its tongue,
a penny warmed in the cheek of its roads—
worn and worried
until the copper taste is prayer.

Behind the diner,
sugared dough and cigarette smoke
braid themselves into a rope.
Steam worries the back door
that never learned to latch,
and the building exhales like it’s been waiting
to tell on me.

The creek practices stillness,
the way a liar practices tears—
glass-smooth
just long enough
to pass for mercy,
then it blinks
and the bottom comes up grinning.

Every house where I was loved
has kept its mouth open.
Windows unlatched.
Curtains lifting and falling
like pale hands practicing goodbye.
The porch lights click on by themselves
at the hour I used to come home,
bright as a finger raised.

There’s the sidewalk
that taught me the trick of vanishing
without ever packing a bag—
how to make a body small,
how to tuck my hands away
and call it good.
The church pews where the wood remembers
the heat of my knees,
the varnish still tacky with old hymns,
and the air thick with incense and lilies,
sweet as breath you’re not supposed to notice—
a warning you can’t name.

The bar has not forgiven time.
At 11:10 the jukebox drops the same song
like a coin into a well.
The beer sign stutters its red halo.
Heat pools at the small of my back,
and I laugh—
that bright, borrowed laugh—
like sorrow rented a room
in somebody else’s house
and left me the key.

The bedrooms keep their breath
between the studs:
drywall dust, rainwater,
the sweet rot of a window that stayed shut
out of loyalty.
A car in the yard coughs twice
and gives up
like it’s still waiting for my hands
to learn the right kind of leaving.

People who knew the worst of me
are still here—
not in bodies, maybe,
but in the way a screen door snaps
when no one touched it,
in the way my old nickname
skitters across gravel
and stops behind my heel.

And once—just once—
a pair of hands held my face steady,
thumbs gentle as bandage tape,
cupping their love around the bruise
as if it might bloom.
I walked away anyway,
petal by petal, pretending it was weather.

Some of the ghosts are loud.
They shoulder open doors
I swore I nailed.
Ash drifts through the rafters of my chest
as if my heart is a burned-out house
and they have the run of it.
Old names knock from inside the closet—
hanger-squeak, dust,
the almost-breath—
and then a voice,
thin as thread,
saying:
Come back.
Come back.
We kept the light on.

The town itself hasn’t moved.
It just got good at waiting.
It holds my shape
like a coat left on a hook—
collar gone soft with damp,
dust settling into the shoulders winter after winter—
and sometimes, when the wind turns mean,
it shakes the whole street
to see if I’ll slip my arms back in.

Sometimes I miss it—
the door-chime of the diner,
the creek’s bright lie,
the porch light clicking its tongue;
the way my own footsteps
used to spend me back to myself
one small change at a time.

You don’t ask if I’ve stayed warm.
You ask if I’ve built a life
out of leaving—
or if leaving
has built a life
out of me.