you kissed me under paper stars,
their seams disguised beneath limelight;
for a heartbeat, i believed in forever -
a script too fragile to bear the night’s
burden, a fabric unraveling in my grip.

i watched the corners of the set collapse
yet begged the spotlight to linger still,
to let each handcrafted star stay pinned
above us, to trap us inside the rehearsed glow
before the fiction slipped away again.

the silence swelled louder than any score,
a desolate script grinding through my
teeth; my voice fractured against the rafters,
a shadow of myself still moving to each cue
with a body reciting lines it never chose.

even still, i prayed for the reel to spool again -
not for each light or polished scene, but
for your hand reaching, grasping, through the
dark, to the fragile illusions we cobbled
into truth, the warmth of each falsehood.

your face flickered between smoke-filled frames,
lines bleeding, smeared, across my trembling
mouth; the painted set dissolved into melting
walls as i reached for your palm’s weight in mine
and found only air, only wet paint.

when did each memory surrender to
script, collapsing into facade and design?
i mouthed each word as though they were
mine, while the walls crumbled inward, trapping
me inside a dream i could not abandon.

i pleaded incessantly for those lights to ignite,
not to blind me, but to blur me in their glow;
better the greasepaint, the written lies
than waking to the silence that unmakes belief
that nothing we once cradled could ever remain.

i clawed for a morsel of my own reflection in
the backdrop, a memory not bound to cue or
scene; what remains when the set is struck?
an echo, a shadow, a nameless ghost
drifting through the script’s void?

atop these plaster hillsides, i reach again
for those fragile paper stars stitched in limelight;
their glow, too thin to last, haunts me, dismantles
me, convinces me to cling to the crafted story
as if fiction were suddenly worth believing.