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The wind rustles through the trees,
and I hear it again,
the faint hiss,
the whisper valves of ventilators
that never gave enough,
never gave them what they needed.

The chirp of a phone,
once a cheerful sound,
now carries the weight of alarms,
the pressure too low,
the numbers that never balanced,
the helplessness that stained my skin.

The voices of loved ones,
full of rage,
cut through the air,
their words like knives,
pointing at me,
blaming me for the loss,
when I was just another body
lost in the crush.

I hear fragments of yesterday’s conversations,
echoing from other rooms,
the words rising up from the depths,
pulling me back
to faces I couldn’t save,
to hands I couldn’t hold.

Nightmares flood the quiet,
the faces of the dead replaying,
one by one,
their eyes wide with terror,
knowing the end was near,
but never knowing how much further I could go
to pull them back.

They live with me now,
these souls who didn’t make it,
and every day,
they linger like shadows,
in the corner of my mind,
in the breath I can’t take,
in the weight of the silence after the chaos.

They are ghosts,
carried by the air,
by the wind that whispers of what I failed to do.
And every night,
I hear their last breaths,
feel the emptiness in their absence,
and know,
they will never leave me.