By Sushvika Yepuri
Parting—if only one of us
understood the reality of it.
The unrequited love one portrays...
But is it true?
Parted? Not really, never really.
“I’m stuck with you eternally.”
Forever a ghost—not in my past,
that’s a façade—
but a ghost in my present and future.
“I shall bleed till my veins are dripped in alcohol, which is the poison
that will be coursing through my heart.”
But I do not drink alcohol—
so how may I ever forget you?
How may I ever forget you, knowing you exist
in the same bone marrow kingdom as me,
but never can be with me?
A ghost?
No—
“Darling, my sweetheart, you are way worse than that.
A ghost can taunt me till I’m scared,
but you, my love,
you haunt me till I fall back in love with you again.”
Which is my tombstone, carved by your perfect rough hands—
my graveyard entombed with your memories.
But there is no ‘I,’
there was never me.
“You claim you love me, but you never claim me.”
God—now that is called the real destruction of chaos
we built.
But when it was time—and when it will be—
you will somehow always prove
that it is I who is in the wrong,
it is I who committed a sin—not you.
And I can never, nor will I ever, prove my innocence.
For I may be the one with the moral high ground,
but for the truth of my decayed heart, so to speak,
I committed a sin long ago—when I wanted to claim something
before I knew it was forbidden.
“You were the forbidden fruit I had to lure
in order for me to continue to be cursed.”
My rival has never proven to be more precise.
Now they drag me to use a carnifex,
with a guillotine waiting to behead me,
as you watch me from afar.
But my sick mind—mingled with the exquisitely dangerous taste
of the velvet hues of hate and love—
thought that they were the cataract of love.
I bend over, accepting the fate of the cursed
who desired the forbidden—
to execute me, for I have sinned.
Then I experience the most unhuman thing known to mankind.
I experience my heart stopping
before they dismember my body and my head.
But God! Do I love it—
love, because for a moment there,
I had an arcane insight of the many women left unloved,
not because they can’t be loved,
but because the threads of fate for seraphic amour
were cursed and sealed away.
I experienced the moment my heart stopped—
and I, for one,
witnessed enough time-worn mastery to live through it.
I died before they executed me with the guillotine.
Yet still—
now that feels forbidden.
Forbidden, that I did not take part in the most painful death.
You, my moonlit desire, were the cause of my death.
That did not angst me.
But you never touched me.
Right before I died—dead—
your touch was never placed on mine,
to at least show the world I was still being cursed in my abyss.
Why was I forbidden from you?
That is you, who never said a word to anyone.
But I did.
That is what got me killed.
For I am not wrathful that you caused me
to walk the road to an executioner.
But even before death,
you never staked a claim to me.
You drove the stake in my heart,
yet cemented my death as yours.
The angst in me is because you, my love,
had the ownership of my love—
but never had any ownership over me.
Claimed my love, decreed my death—
yet you never claimed me.
Because I never let you, and I never can—
which led me to my permanent stay with the Reaper,
and you with the bedpost of a woman—
a woman I didn’t know of.
I never let you claim me fully.
In the end, my declaration of not giving consent to you
is what killed me.
My speech of not giving consent to you—
while you carved your sanctuary into another woman’s bed—
was my demise.
How could I ever give you the right to claim me,
when your half-heart belonged to
a woman I never knew about?
A woman I never thought existed in your life?
How could I give you my eternal rest
if your carved spindle, your arm, your muscle,
the depth of your shoulder while nurturing the waist—
was of another woman from years ago?
How could I?
You already belonged to someone else,
and you didn’t even tell me.
Then how will I ever truly feel I belong with you,
if you don’t fully belong to me?
If your bedpost was the right of another woman?
If your concern was the claim of another woman first?
I never let you claim me,
for I never wanted to harm the woman you loved first.
I never let you claim me,
no matter how much I wanted to be called yours,
claimed as yours, owned as yours.
Because I never wanted the woman you first loved
to know about me—
to know about me and cry,
to feel pain,
to cause her pain.
I lost you
because I never wanted to hurt the woman you first gave your heart to.
Losing you is more pain worth enduring
than causing her the misery of pain similar to mine.
Because in the end,
my noble wit of right and wrong got me killed—not you.
But I would never change it.
Had I hoped for a better circumstance?
Yes.
Had I hoped you never belonged to any woman?
Yes.
Had I hoped you never lied to me?
Yes.
Had I hoped you’d told me the truth before I fell in love with you?
Damn yes.
Had I hoped you belonged to me and no one else?
Yes.
Had I hoped, even for a moment, that you would be mine?
Yes.
Or maybe… I still do.
But do I hope to change anything?
No.
No.
Because in the midst of falling in love with you—
but not being able to be with you,
and you who already belonged to a different woman—
because I could never betray another woman like that…
Well,
I think I fell in love with the woman
that my girlhood would be so proud of.
The Machiavellian, witty, noble intellect of wrong and right—
I fell in love with that.
Because mark my words—in the coming days,
the word loyalty will be banned from history books.
Yet I laid my loyalty to a woman I never even met.
Because what I did in the termination
was not just right,
was not just having the higher moral ground—
it was brave,
it was rare,
it was powerful,
and it was me.
That’s who I truly am.
It don’t matter how far I love you.
It matters where my morality lies
when it comes to another woman—
even if it leads to my own destruction of life.
It don’t matter how far I love you
if that means it costs me my ethics,
my integrity,
my values.
For you and I are always meant to be cursed forever.
For that is the curse of the half-belonged.
Forever in the eternity
as I force my stay with the necromancer,
as I watch you tell the woman by your side
never about me.
Feeling happy as I died,
as well as tormented by my memories—
the memories of illicit affair of love lore.
I will sleep in the haunting house
that you crafted for me to never forget.