Event Horizon

I watched the light bend around your absence, the way spacetime warps near something massive— not a star, but the memory of one, collapsed into a point so dense even photons lose their nerve. They say nothing escapes a black hole. They are wrong. Hawking radiation bleeds from the edge, slow and thermal, the universe's way of grieving what it swallowed whole. I stand at the event horizon of your leaving and feel myself stretch— spaghettified, the physicists call it, which sounds almost funny until you realize it means being pulled apart one atom at a time toward something you cannot see and cannot stop approaching. The last signal I sent you is still traveling outward at the speed of light, which means somewhere, somewhen, I am still saying your name into the void and the void has not yet decided whether to answer.