There are times — caught in the gentle silence between minutes — that I feel I exist only in the aftershock of you. Not in your presence, but the imagination of you, or the remains of your absence, like light that still reaches the earth long after the star is dead. And in those tender moments, I begin to understand: you are not someone I remember, but someone I am. There is not a thought untouched by you. There is no time I have not felt the ache of you.
I have always understood time to be a linear phenomenon and thought of it as a functioning interpreter of that time. And then there was you — the strange and beautiful stop in the otherwise deepening journey of my life — and you shattered every perception I had of both. Because you, my darling, are neither time nor thought. You are everything that occurs in between them — the silence in the back-and-forth between logic and longing, the breath I hold before experiencing something sacred.
You are the question that makes all other answers seem unnecessary. You are the fleeting moment that is experienced as an eternity, the second in which the hands of a clock tremble and forget how to move.
I no longer look back at memories, but at existential markers - proof of a life touched by the divine and the terrible. That first sight, where your eyes seemed to hold the weight of histories I had never lived but somehow remembered. The way your laughter gave a kind of architecture to my emptiness. The way I stopped fearing death, because I had tasted eternity in a single moment with you.
How sad we too were subjected to time, that even infinity was not immune to ends.
But perhaps that is how we are real, you and I - the awareness that something so impossibly rare could never survive in a universe governed by entropic decay. I don\'t regret our end, not even with the pain it gifted me. Because what we had-what you were to me-was the only proof I could ever need that meaning could exist, even if only for a little while, in a world indifferent to meaning.
Sometimes I wonder: was I your lover, or was I simply a witness to your beauty, witness destined only for sight (never to keep)? You, the walking paradox - the storm and the shelter; the question and the answer; the wound and the remedy. You lived in contradictions and taught me to love them.
Yours where time dissolves,
In the ache between moments,
In this tremble of a being
— A Mind Still Haunted by Her