I’m writing to you with a shaking hand and a heart much heavier than all of the oceans that have touched your name upon my lips. There was a time, how sacredly foolish this seems now, where I prayed for your presence and turned your absence into songs. I was blind enough to refer to you as a homeland, my escape, the refuge I would return to, the earth on which every aspiration of mine flourished. However, I blanked out, due to my devotion, that my homelands too - could be conquered seized and taken away.
I remember you being the Sun after Winter. I built poems with your name in every line, carved a life in the shade of your smile, and told the world I had finally found what so many die seeking. Everything changed the moment I was able to love you. Oh how beautifully I longed to believe that this is where I would return.
But Love isn\'t a flag that can be raised only to your whims, it also isn\'t a piece of land to be conquered and then forgotten.
You left me not with a goodbye, but with the cruel grace of betrayal cloaked in silence. You suffocated love out of your heart and vacated mine as if a breeze would whisk me away. And I—foolishly stood there, conjuring up the fantasy where love can’t simply unravel.
What hurts most is not that you stopped loving me. It is that you let me believe you still did. You watched me water dead roots, write letters into the void, and beg the stars for answers you already held in your heart. You became foreign to me while wearing the face I once called home.
You were my homeland but you built your borders without telling me. You turned your back, locked your gates, and rewrote the map while I still clung to the memory of us.
And now I\'m left alone unarmed among the ruins —not of war but of our love. Your name still rings like an anthem inside me, but it no longer belongs. It no longer saves.
If this letter ever reaches you then just know that I loved you more than a patriot loving his Nation with affection more firm than the Northern Stars. But even the most relentless lovers let it go when the War is lost.
I consider this an epitaph over our remains, a statement of my love and admiration. I bid adieu: not to you, but to the false beliefs that I previously donned as my pride.
No longer yours,
The exile you created.