I still remember that moment when love first carved its name into my bones. It was not a whisper, but a conflagration; an immolation so complete that I barely recognized the ashes of my former self of who I was, hell what I was. She was autumn sunlight caught in human form, a fleeting vision of gold and grace, shining sapphires on the oceans' blue waters. Our eyes met, I knew I was doomed. Love, in its earliest woes, is a kind of beautiful delirium. But I did not yet understand that its twin is always loss, and its only absolution is release.
In the beginning, love was a sacred sickness. It pulsed behind my ribs like a second heartbeat, more it was my forever high... drunk in love, one calls it. I had never seen or loved another, I couldn't cause i belonged to her feverishly and unrelenting. Every glance from her was a benediction; every word she spoke, a verse from some holy text I yearned to memorize. I composed sonnets in the dead of night, ink bleeding across parchment like wounds because language was the only alchemy that could transmute longing into something tangible. She was my muse ;my source.
I thought love was a thing to be clutched tightly, a jewel to be hidden away from thieves and time. I never wanted to share with the world. She was sent by the universe for me. I loved the way we laughed; so loud n genuine; i knew what her every eyeroll meant. To hold her to sleep at the end of the day reminded me she was mine just mine.But love is not a possession;it is a current, a force that pulls you under even as it teaches you how to breathe water. She was both the ocean and the storm, and I, a drowning piece who no longer cared to reach the shore.
THEN IT HAPPENED .MY HEART STOPPED.
Her absence was not a mere subtraction. It was an annihilation. The world did not simply dim; it became a sepia-toned wasteland, drained of music and meaning. I wandered through days like a ghost haunting its own life, clutching at remnants a half finished letter, the scent of her perfume lingering on a scarf, the echo of her laughter in crowded rooms. Her glasses still by our bedside.
Grief is not a linear thing. It is a spiral, a labyrinth with no exit. Some days, it was a leaden weight pressing my lungs flat. Other days, it was a blade slipped between my ribs, so sharp I gasped at the surprise of it. I wrote elegies that scorched the page, each word a funeral pyre. I dreamed of her, not as the woman she was, but as a spectre woven from smoke and sorrow. In those dreams, she would reach for me, her fingers dissolving before they could brush my cheek and I'd wake with tears in my eyes.
I wanted to rage at the heavens. I wanted to claw my way into the afterlife and drag her back. She was my Eurydice i nwanted to be her Orpheous . I swore to the gods i woundbt look back if they'd let me.But the dead do not return. They only linger in the hollows they leave behind.
Slowly, I started to feel the sun again . Was this letting go ...was the sombre washing away? I did not want it to stop.. the grieving .Did it mean I stopped loving her? Did it mean she stopped shining up on me... I couldn't
It came in fragments a sigh loosened after years of holding your breath, a morning when you wake and realize the weight on your chest has lightened just enough to let in air.
At first, I resisted. To let go felt like betrayal. If I stopped mourning, would I forget the curve of her smile? If I healed, did that mean my love had been fleeting?
But time is a sculptor, patient, and pitiless. It does not erase; it reshapes. The pain did not vanish it transformed. It became something softer, like a scar that no longer burns but still tells its story when touched. I found myself laughing again, and for the first time, guilt did not rush in to drown the sound.
I still spoke to her, but now it was less a plea and more a conversation. I began to understand that love does not die it simply changes form. It becomes memory. Then legend. Then something even more enduring an ember buried deep in the marrow, warming you from within
One evening, I stood beneath the same sky where we had once traced constellations with our fingers. The stars were indifferent, as they had always been. But for the first time, I did not resent them for outlasting her. Instead, I felt something like gratitude not for the loss but for the love that had been vast enough to make the loss so devastating.
They say the heart is a muscle that learns to beat around the hole left behind. But that is not quite right. The heart does not fill the absence it grows around it, like vines over ruins.
I am no longer the girl who just loved her. Nor am I the ghost who haunted her memory. I am something else now someone who has learned that love is not a cage but a key. It does not chain you to the past; it unlocks doors you never knew existed.
I do not know if she hears me when I whisper to the wind. I do not know if love survives death. But I know this: the love I carry now is lighter. It does not drag me under it lifts me.
And so, I open my hands. I let her go. Not from my heart, but from my grasp. I let her be what she was always meant to be a star I can admire but never hold, a melody that lingers long after the song has ended.
This is the art of letting go. Not forgetting. Not moving on. But loving without drowning in it.
If you are listening
I have rebuilt myself from the wreckage.
Not into what I was before you,
but into something that remembers
Without breaking.
I have loved you in every tense
Past, present, the eternal.
Now, at last, I love you enough
to set you free.
I'll always love you.
