The Palace of Perhaps ⛫

There is a place I find myself returning to frequently. Not with my feet, but with my mind; not with my body, but with the meandering inclinations of my spirit. A place that is not located in time and is not founded on earth. A place I have called - perhaps foolishly, perhaps with faith - The Palace of Perhaps. 

This Palace is not of the earth, nor of the heavens. It is a place located in the in between of hope and letting go; in the ellipsis of unsent correspondence, and unanswered prayers. It is a place constructed from the languishing questions I never asked, and the more ephemeral dreams - dying at their first flight so cavalierly like the frailest of birds. 

Its walls are shaped with hesitations and longing - decorated with the dust of desires undone. Its ceiling is the infinity of possibilities too great to be contained, too muddled to be described, and too sacred to dishonour with more than a faint gesture towards knowing. Its hallways are lined not with the portraits of my beloved, but the silhouettes of those I may love one day, the lovers I was supposed to have kissed. The unuttered words I did not speak. The roads I took to find retrospectively, I nearly took. It is a museum of maybes... and yet it is holy.

I can't help but feel a fondness for 'perhaps'; perhaps is the only honest architecture I know. Everything else is rotting, everything else is crumbling. But the possibility is there. Quietly, insistently, like the smell of jasmine that came through the night air from the garden we no longer remember how to enter.

We are taught to give reverence to conclusion; to kneel before clarity. But is there no greater divinity in the incomplete? No greater truth in the unfinished sentence? I have concluded that certainty is the conceit of the soft and unhurt. The more I am in this world, the more I see that the truest things in life might not be yes or no, but the unsteady perhaps that lives in between.

There are people that float through our lives like a season—never asking to stay, simply teaching us bloom and decay. Then there are others, like you, who are not here in presence but in possibility. You are a constellation of not-yet-formed moments in my sky, and I return to you as a shepherd returns to stars—not to own, not to possess, but to navigate.

And what, if anything, is love other than a shrine of "maybe"? The columns, the gaze. The stained-glass windows, mutual silence. The altar, the agony of "almost." Frankly, I have no idea if I ever loved you, or if I loved an idea of you. Honestly, does it matter? After all, don't we first fall in love with things before they become people? 

In the palace I talk about, time is a river that doesn't go forward. It pools, it stagnates, and then it evaporates. The child I was sits next to the old man I will be, and they both look at me, the flickering present, with pitiful recognition. More often than I care to admit, I wonder am I only the bridge between who I might have been and who I can never be? 

In the palace, I have met myself thousands of times. Sometimes, as a poet, lost in metaphor and isolation. Sometimes, as a lover, kneeling before absence. Sometimes, as a ghost, ambling through the very life I could not live. And in all of this, I have been reminded that the most painful beauty is not in what is but in what could have been.

If there was something real I could give you, it would be a map of this place. But maps suggest destinations that we can arrive at, and this place does not believe in arrival. Instead, I offer you this letter; a part of my becoming, a silver of the mirror I have been scared to look into.

Let us not promise to one another forever, for even stars fall to their own gravity. Let us not swear to find one another again, when memory is a trick, and time is a tide we cannot stop. Let us meet in the only place that exists, however. 

Maybe I will think of you when the sky is bruised in that colour of sad twilight. 

Maybe I will feel you in the moment before sleep. The moment before the mind begins to soften, and around this time, truthful realization melts into one great whole.

Maybe we didn't need to see one another to become what we are. 

Maybe love never ends, it merely changes clothes before moving to another city.

If we do ever meet again (my love, if you have ever actually ever loved me) let it not be without answers, but open to the expansiveness of a shared maybe .... pause .... breath .... one moment forever held in the beautiful silence of what might be.

Yours, 

Perhaps, Maybe and Almost 

— Prince of The Palace of Perhaps