it doesn't live here anymore

it hasn't lived here in memory, It said,  
standing -straight, tall, imposing, cruelly arrogant- precisely on the threshold,
telling me all i needed to know, with no word spoken on the matter.
 
my speech -volume, tone, rate, enunciation- betrayed me
my body -posture, quality of presence, timidity of eyes, chin, mouth, stomach- revealed
a new minimum requirement for preserving substantiality,
these spoke the truth of me as a ghost, regardless of what noises came from my lips
 
  i do not know what third rate version of energy moved the machinery of word sounds in  
    me.  
    a deep bench player, with no enthusiasm for any of this, but also no experience of being  
    definitively beaten, no understanding that its reason for existing was only to formalize  
    the way things were.  
    the game needed to run to its end, and so it is sent out only to be eliminated  
    at the final horn.  
    this is despressingly axiomatic.  the conditions for defeat must be met. there
    is no question.
 
do you know why it left?  
    (was there real curiosity in that?)
 
It grew, then, in the doorway, filling up space, disappearing space.
Its voice grew with Its form and Its power so expanded:  
a perfectly functioning  Thing, all its parts well endowed and in terrible agreement
 
It said:  some things cannot exist in the same space as other things.  the weaker thing must leave.  so it left
 
may i come in?  i lived here with it.  i guess i'm nostalgic for the good times we had here  
     (hesitantly, but with something that could be mistaken for intent, if agency
      had any  
      place in this close to last stage in the transaction
      and what is this?  one galling foot shuffling an inch, maybe more, toward
      what can only    
      be a final death?)
 
Then It became all there was, became Its unyielding fact.  Now It was the space, and It was always the space.
 
there is nothing for you here.  not even residue to sniff at
 
and that was the final terrible truth.  turning away was just the required formality come to pass, the horn at the end of the game.  only the ghost that was i heard the resounding emptiness.  all other things had long ago took to the exits.  
 
and the ghost is only the anti-presence only the ghost itself has some indistinct bare awareness of.  the wandering ghost is the by-product of  
Its eminent domain,
the compensation being the tortuous unremitting sense  (not a remembering, far less than that)
that It did not always fill that space.