There is a chair the world forgot to move,
still waiting by the window where your silence learnt my name.
Dust has become the gentlest thing that ever stayed with me;
people, unlike dust, always discover how to leave.
I have carried your absence
the way old stations carry the echo of departed trains—
never asking them to return,
only remembering the weight of their farewell.
They say time is a faithful surgeon.
Mine stitched the wound with invisible thread,
so no one could admire the scar,
yet every heartbeat still tears it open.
The cruellest loneliness is not an empty room.
It is laughing at a crowded table
while searching every unfamiliar face
for the one that no longer belongs to the earth beside yours.
Some nights I envy the rain.
It is allowed to fall without apology.
I learnt to become a man,
which often meant learning how to bleed without witnesses.
And perhaps women know another sorrow:
to leave fragments of themselves
inside those who never noticed
they were carrying entire galaxies in gentle hands.
If love survives anywhere,
it is not in promises, rings, or photographs.
It survives in the foolish habit
of turning towards an empty place
as though someone might still be there.
Should you ever remember me,
do not remember my voice.
Remember the silence after it,
for that is where I hid everything
I never found the courage to say.
One day another stranger will sit beside the window.
The chair will not know our names.
The dust will not tell our story.
Yet somewhere beyond the reach of clocks,
every soul we failed to keep
still walks beside us—
quietly, lovingly,
like a train forever arriving
at a station that exists only in the heart.