It is said that time heals all wounds, but I find it to be a thief — quiet, calculated, and merciless—stealing not just my days, but what each day could have been. There is a hallowed chamber in my heart that is more solemn than a tomb, that is more enduring than any Empire I may have imagined I built in my youth. I call this place — maybe in the spirit of poets, maybe in the spirit of lunatics- the Mausoleum of May-Have-Beens.
It is not a place of marble halls and candle-lit corridors. No — it is made of memory, the arches\' vaults are hewn from sighs, its chapels consecrated with tears I was too afraid to give voice to. It houses all the unlived lives — the lovers I never kissed, the joys I never embraced, the selves I never became. And in that it never chases itself into the most human of pains.
Because you see, I have wandered — not just the cities and the seasons, but the brittle terrain of the self. I have gazed into the face of possibility and turned away; not because I didn\'t want it, but because I was cowardly enough to think I was wise. And out of that cowardice, I birthed my mausoleum — not of stone — but of silence.
Your existence, dear lady - if I may also say your quasi-existence - is etched into the very perches of this place. I have known you only vaguely and contingently: not in the flesh but in thought; not in fact but in the trembling-ness of a might-have-been moment before it happens. A hundred times I have tried to take your hand in the theatre of sleep, and then awoke, as uncertain as a vibrating string that has remained unplayed.
You were never mine - and never was it perhaps meant to be - yet I carry you with more intimacy than any other memory. You are the echo of every silence I keep, the softness behind my defiance, the unuttered name for every poem. What misery to have loved you in futures which never came to be.
When I was young - those brief, glorious tyrannies - I sought love the way one seeks forgiveness. I, like the poet-bards, had waded into that ideation that love redeems, that it ushers the soul toward the eternal. I have found love to be a mirror, and not a very nice one - reflecting not what is, but what one hopes to become.
And in the rubble left from my expectation sat, not alone, in the dust released from dead dreams — and I wondered: was it love or was it simply the yearning to be seen? By loving you, was I not only reaching for an outside version of who I could never be?
Isn\'t it a merciless gift - to feel everything and find nothing beneath your feet? This funeral home is not a mausoleum of tragedy. Just maybe. And maybe I am starting to believe it is the strongest poison time has ever made.
I have no grand delusions - no holy scripts, no divine comfort. The stars burn like coal. God - if we are even to assume God speaks at all, speaks in symbols that we were never meant to decipher. The heart, in its foolishness, keeps beating not out of hope, but from habit.
Yet I write. I write because -- like all cursed romantics -- I write because I have to bleed elegantly, or not at all. I write your name, not on stone, but final. The universe will bear witness, and maybe, on some gentle dusk, when you feel the nameless ache, it will be my voice, almost remember.
Don\'t take this as bitterness. When love curdles, the result is bitterness. But mine never had the chance to curdle because it never got past the point of seed. Its beauty is unspoiled. It is pure sorrow, unblemished. There is a beauty in what may never exist.
And so here I am — a poet among the graveyards of unbegun stories. A shipwrecked knight who made a defence of castles wrought of breath. A lover for whom his greatest affair was one of absence.
And if you ever should feel, amid your busy life, a silence too perfect to be by coincidence, recall this: I am there. In the interlude. In the pause of the limb. In the breath before you forget again.
Yours in what never was,
and never shall be —
Love or whatever remains of it
A pilgrim of possibilities, exiled in his reverie