my bird & you

To lose one of you was cruel. To lose you both, at once, has killed me. I think of you often, and it takes everything from me not to answer when you call.

The road out of you is long, much longer than I thought it would be. None of it makes any sense. The time I spend thinking of you is more than the time we’ve spent together. You were ordinary, just like any other man. And yet, you were unlike them all.

You were better at chasing lovers with your camera than you were at loving. You were trying to touch with your lens what could have just as easily been yours. And yet, there were moments when it was beautiful and quiet between us and you loved me well.

You came back with pain, so much of it… I could have held you, I had space for you and all your pain inside me. I would have put it beside my own and carried it happily. But you chose solitude over love; you chose the memory of our disaster over the possibility of us.

Have your shallow eyes ever tried to read beyond the skin of a woman? Have you ever had the patience to stay through the winter of love? There are no seasons that pass through you now…only dry days with no breeze and no sunsets…nothing that rises, nothing that falls.

I wish I could undo your touch, erase the silent memory of you when you spoke to me with your body. I thought it was your most honest self speaking. Now I wonder if it was just your body seeking its desperate passage out of loneliness.

Still and stupidly, I love you. And still, I am trying to let you go. But it’s as if the void you once came from won’t accept you back, and you can never become nothing again to me.

You’ll never know what it was you said no to, what kind of rare love you turned away from. I know your loss better than you’ll ever know it. I carry what was meant to be yours. I am stuck with this useless, stubborn luggage of love.

The road out of you is long, Ahmed, and there are times when I wish you’d walk it with me.