By Vinisha Malik
it was never the butterflies,
it was the way my chest collapsed under the weight of your absence.
it was the panic, the clench of something primal in me,
that eventually learnt that loving you,
would mean gradually mourning you,
the beauty was never in the flutter,
but in the agony of knowing,
you are the wound,
I am bound to keep open.
you want to know how deep it runs?
if you stabbed me,
I swear, I'd cry,
because I wouldn't get to see your face as I died.
I fear losing you like breath fears drowning,
slow, inevitable,
cruel in its patience,
the words keep bleeding,
and I realised,
losing you is not a sentence,
it is an ache,
an unfinished ending I write again,
and again,
in blood, in silence.
this is my final devotion,
not goodbye,
but ink,
not healing,
but reliving,
we will not end.
you will exist in the raw throat of every line I bleed,
you will be the echo in my poems,
that never learnt that to love you was to prepare for the ache of losing you,
in soft, deliberate degrees.