The Echo of What Never Was

I sense a veil of profound melancholy,
not for what was and has since faded away,
but for a dawn that never met the tide,
an unknown pathway I never walked.
It is for a smile I waited to see,
for whispered words in days unborn,
of a brilliant future, held in suspension,
that I wove in dreams, yet never achieved.
An imagined love, a journey left undone,
the profile of a face I never knew,
another self, within a fate held fast,
in the endless limbo of a time designed.
Though I have never touched that distant past,
I bear its memory, a gentle shade,
of a world constructed just within my mind,
a sweet silence, so hard to find.