A Ghost That Never Left
I do not love the man who walks this earth today.
The years have altered him,
as rivers alter stone,
as seasons strip cathedrals of their ivy,
as time performs its quiet vandalism
upon all things once worshipped.
No.
The one I love no longer exists.
He survives only
in the sanctum of recollection,
a luminous phantom
preserved beneath the glass bell jar of longing,
untouched by disappointment,
unweathered by reality.
And still I ache for him.
What an extraordinary affliction it is,
to spend one's life enamored
with a ghost of one's own making.
I know this.
God knows I know this.
I know that memory is a consummate liar,
an artisan of impossible beauties.
I know that yearning gilds the ordinary
until it resembles divinity.
I know that absence writes poetry
upon faces that reality might have rendered mundane.
And yet—
every road within me
leads back to him.
Somewhere in the hidden architecture of my mind,
love has become inseparable from his image.
The neural constellations are fixed.
The synapses spark,
and his face arrives.
Love,
and then him.
Devotion,
and then him.
Tenderness,
and then him.
As though my heart,
encountering him once,
mistook a single star
for the entire night sky.
I have wondered often
whether this is tragedy.
Whether it is a misfortune
to carry such inexhaustible affection
for someone who cannot receive it.
But there are evenings
when I suspect otherwise.
For what is love,
if not evidence of aliveness?
What is longing,
if not the soul refusing to become inert?
The body may diminish.
The years may accumulate their dust.
Entire worlds may collapse into silence.
Yet somewhere within me
a chamber remains illuminated.
A place where his name
still moves through the air
like incense through a cathedral.
A place where affection,
undomesticated and boundless,
continues its ancient vigil.
And perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps not every love
was meant to become a life.
Some are meant only
to become a landscape.
A country we never leave.
A sacred ruin we revisit.
A beautiful impossibility
whose purpose was never possession,
but transformation.
For he taught me something
without ever intending to.
He taught me
that the human heart is capable
of loving beyond reciprocity,
beyond reason,
beyond conclusion.
And though I will never hold him,
I carry the consequence of loving him
in every corner of my being.
Not the man himself.
Not anymore.
But the exquisite ghost
he became.
The one time could not keep,
yet memory refused to surrender.
The one who lives nowhere now
except
in the endless republic
of my soul.
~Arpita (30.05.2026)
