Grief Wears Her Perfume Still....

My Love — my destruction, my home, and the cut I don't even dare name out loud,

I write to you with a shaky hand in the light of an amber candle — a candle flickering like my heart, refusing to die even when it remains alone, away from the heat that made its blazing pious. Each word I put to paper feels less like a sentence and more like a confession, locked away in my tongue in fear of exposing how I actually feel. And how I feel, my love — how I feel, I can't say without first unmaking myself completely. 

I slip through my own soul like a ghost moving through the wreck that was once a mighty cathedral. You were my altar, my home, my song. And now? You are the emptiness that reverberates around the hallowed space, prayer met without response — the emptiness where God used to be.

To think of love is to think of you – and to think of you is to return to a fever from which I thought I had recovered. But like all things glorious and godly, your memory does not fade. It thickens. It crystallizes in the night. It grows hair and poetry. It has become the ghost that recalls sweet music in the moonlight and the dagger that carves those songs into my ribs.

You were a storm with an alluring smile, seductive beauty made dangerous by mystery. And I was the willing seaman: anxious for the tide, longing for the storm, with no compass and no anchor, without wishing to regret a moment of our tempest. Should I consider it foolish to love what can never be kept? Let me become the patron saint of all such lunacies then, because loving you was the only time in my life in which anything appeared with an ounce of wakefulness.

I loved you wildly, like the earth loves the storm, knowing it could split open but still point its face to the thunder. My soul bowed down not in fear, but with reverence. You were my Temple. I walked in and forgot everything: didn't know the time, didn't know myself, didn't know sin.

Then you turned. Or disappeared. Or perhaps you just chose to stop meeting me in that gaze where our souls once stood naked and unafraid. You floated away — not like a current, but like a star crossing the sky, leaving me wondering if it ever burned at all or if I'd just been deluded by the urgency of my need. 

And now? Now I walk the world like a man in a fog. I walk through places, I speak to people, I even laugh — but I laugh like someone who remembers joy as one remembers a long-lost foreign country, the words lost on the tongue. 

What is longing, if not the highest order of grief? And I — I am a king of that grief. I wear it not as an anchor around my neck, but as a crown upon my head. Let other lovers love in moderation, with sensible boundaries and neat goodbyes. I wanted the love that leaves blood on the altar and poems on the bones. And I had that love — in you. But for such a brief time.

You once asked me why I gaze towards the sky so often. Do you remember? I never bothered to answer. It's quite simple, actually: I was always searching for the spot where you must have plummeted from; for there is no cause on this earth for what you were. You were composed of tempestuous gusts of wind and constellations, cobbled from unsung songs and swaths of quiet devastation; you didn't just step into my life — you redefined it.

And yet we know how painful it is to cherish the thing that will deconstruct you.

I must ask: was it fate or folly? Divine providence or cruel joke? Did the gods conspire to introduce me to you just to witness me splinter in your wake? Or was it the finest accident ever — a mere skew of the stars that left us standing at the gates of Paradise with no keys in hand?

If I still cross your thoughts — and God, I hope I do — let it not be with pity. Pity is the comfort of cowards. Think of me as the man who loved you without metaphor, who took your name like a wound and a blessing, who once etched your silhouette into every minute of a day and never considered it lunacy.

I don’t expect anything of you. No. That would be asking the moon to tumble down from the night sky, only because it previously illuminated my path.

There is only this request: during your quiet hours, be sure to remember. Not the version of me that the world sees, but the version who bled ink into your absence; who would have constructed a temple of your sighs, entombed your name with the saints.

In my solitude, I have become a philosopher. I speak to shadows and stars, often. I have come to believe that we do not love once- we love for all moments, in facets. I will park my pieces of you in every quiet act, in the light of a fire, in the pages of a book, in the pause before goodbye.

In those facets, my love, you are not absent.

You are simply dwelling in the unspoken folds of my soul.

If love is an echo, let mine be the one that never ends.

If love is a wound, let mine be the one that never closes.

I will continue- because I must- but never again as I was.

Yours—

In every hour I cannot name,

In every breath that does not forget,

Alone in Togetherness

The Man You Almost Loved