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. Heavier than the sands of the oceans that kissed your name every time I whispered it between the folds of prayer and the hollow of my chest. There was a time—how sacred and foolish it feels now—when I made you the centre of my universe, the compass that guided me through every storm, and the haven I believed would forever be my home.
I called you my homeland.
I said it with the kind of devotion that made the gods jealous and the stars weep. I said it was not in a metaphor, but in marrow. You were not simply a person to me; you were a place. You were a sacred geography I drew and mapped with trembling fingers and worshipped like an innocent who had never tasted displacement. I believed I had found what every soul secretly longs for—a place where the ache would stop. But how blind I had been. How naive.
I forgot—yes, in the innocent unknowingness of love—that homelands fall too. That they are fragile. That sometimes, they fall not through war or disaster but through silence. Through a slow fading warmth. Through the minute, unnoticed absences that begin to stretch like cracks in a wall until, one day, it just falls apart.
You were my sun after centuries of internal winter. I can still recall how you looked at me—or the way I thought you looked at me—as if I were somehow worth your time. I made poems out of your name. I folded futures around your laughter. I turned every one of your words into gospel. I drank from your heart and believed I had somehow found forever. But what is love if not an indoctrinating master of illusion?
I know now you did not leave in a moment; you left in moments. You didn\'t slam the door. You didn\'t sever ties. You just... drifted. You let distance curl and grow between us like a vine until I couldn\'t reach you. And still, I called it love. Still, I asked the stars to bless our un-tying.
I still thought you would be mine to come back to—always.
But love is not a territory to lay claim to. It is not a country with a border, nor a kingdom with a birthright.
And betrayal—more often than not, it doesn\'t come with blood and thunder. It sometimes wears the face of someone we, at one time, thought was home.
You let me love you long after you stopped loving me. You let me cast eternity while you were already walking down the path to the exit. You let me pour love into a cup that you had already emptied. I was watering dead roots and wondering why nothing was growing, and I had written letters that were just silence, which had become your language.
And you… You wore your absence like a second skin.
I mean, I can not resent that you stopped loving me. After all, not even love is everlasting. What I can not forgive is that you allowed me to see it otherwise. That you watched me drown in hope, while you knew quite well that the tide never truly shifts.
You ceased to be a local while wearing the face I once called home. You drew borders when we were once seamless.
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.
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