Days, years...time has eclipsed reality. Time is nothing but a colourless piece of cloth pulled back from the void and stretched too tight over the emptiness. What started as an ache has now settled in as the innkeeper, not the guest. Grief is no longer at my heels; it is us, it is the ground beneath my feet, it is the air I breathe. It has become the room, and I have become the reverberation inside it.
I sometimes think about what is left of a man when the person he loved becomes a memory? A not-moving memory - not the laughter spilling out of a glass held and shared, not the shuffle of footsteps after work coming home - but a disc of the man fossilized between the layers of all the days refuses to turn. You\'re gone, like everyone. But not completely. You left your absence, like a spine, and I am still trying to remain upright inside it.
I have come to recognize that existence is not the same as life. Life was with you. Existence is the time after, the mechanics of getting down the street alive, the ghost of the breath, the betrayal of the body that will not die when the soul does. They ask, “How are you?” and I almost laugh — not out of cruelty, but because how do you answer a question that language was never designed for?
I\'ve begun to think of grief not as an emotion but a place. A place with architecture. A place with seasons. A place with weather that changes unexpectedly. And here I am, in that place. Not as a resident, but as a structure. I am the empty hallway. I am the cold window. I am the chair still angled toward where you sat, and now I am not.
Your absence has gravity. It consumes every meaning. Books that I used to love are only ink now. Music - unbearable. And words, even these, feel like a disloyalty - because they are about you, and not for you. I write not to enshrine you, but to tap the vein of a reality in which you might exist between the syllables.
I want to ask you a question I never would have asked had you been here: Did you know what you were doing to time? You made it sacred. You made it worth some measuring. And now every moment post-you is like a counterfeit. It passes, but does not buy anything real.
I move through this universe like a man who\'s lost his image. Everyone sees me, but I don\'t see myself anymore. What am I now but an echo of a voice you made soft? What is love if it isn\'t the space someone occupied so fully that even the dust grieves their absence?
The philosophers talk about essence, of becoming, of making meaning out of the void. But what about the rise of the become because of something else? What happens to the becoming when the architect of becoming disappears? The absurd is no longer a theory — it is the hall I pass through every morning and politely nod to my own ghosts.
I find you in every pause between saying something. I find you in the space that something doesn\'t occupy. In the warmth that used to sit like a cat on my chest, now just the cold reminder of its absence. There are often times when I would like to rage against God, or Time, or whatever nameless silence allowed a gods-forsaken universe to exist in such cruelty — but rage requires movement, and I am at a standstill.
You understand, grief is no longer nearly as whispering. It is no longer in parables — it is all liturgy. It converts your name into its mantra. It doesn\'t pray for healing; it prays for persistence. Because if healing involves forgetting, I would rather rot whole than blossom incomplete.
You were not \"just\" the love of my life. You were the full stop in the sentence that provides the paragraph\'s meaning. And now every day is a run-on — sprawling, gasping, trying to end in something worthy.
People say closure like it is a door. But you — you were not a chapter. You were the book. Now I live in the margins, writing notes of memory and crossing out endings that feel disingenuous.
If only I had said more to you, not just the \"I love you\"s, the little things — like how light looked on your cheek when you leaned toward a window. Or how your laughter once repaired something that was broken in my teenage years. Or that your very presence made my fear retreat like cowardly soldiers retreat at dawn.
But I didn\'t utter those words. Yet now I write — as spells. As incantations. As case studies of nearness, in which I am trying to resurrect something the world is insisting is dead.
You see, grief has become sacred. Your absence is a shrine. And I am the monk, worshipping what was — because what was was more honest than what is. And maybe that is the greatest cruelty of loss — what remains is not lesser; it is truer. You stole the world\'s illusions. Now I am amongst people who still believe.
If you\'re somewhere — if there is anything of you listening through the wind or riding the stillness of midnight — know this:
Your leaving did not end you. It changed only the language in which I say your name.
You are now the silence preceding a prayer.
The long pause preceding the lie of \"I\'m fine.\"
You are now the shape of grief.
You are the dwelling. I am the dweller.
Still yours —
Beyond the tether of clocks,
Beyond the grasp of forgetting,
In the long ache of memory —
The Man Who Would Not Stop Waiting