It appears every time that name is called:

In coffee shops, to a straggling child on the playground,

as one stranger meets another with an embrace and the smile of long-time friends.

The timing does not matter; the place does not matter;

the ache is there each time.

It's as present as the ache your grandmother used to feel when rain was coming.

Your heart leaps in expectancy and then sinks slowly,

slowly back to where it has been living for months.

Heartache takes on a face you used to see every day

and now appears in your dreams

and the whisper of a smile that turned your heart.

Heartache lives in the syllables of a name that paints a memory,

on haunted streets you can no longer walk down,

and in all the corner shops you can't walk in,

but have to walk by.

You keep getting drawn back, because some piece of them

is embedded in the heartache.

A piece of you lives in the heartache,

because maybe then you won't lose the whispers

and hints and what still remains.

You let the ghost drift in and out of your heart

hoping and clinging to the idea

that another word for heartache is love.