Sajeer Shaikh

There are videos on YouTube that I skip past now. There are playlists on Spotify I haven’t frequented in weeks. There are words that used to fill me with joy that I can no longer hear without feeling stabbed in the heart.

No one tells you that a part of you dies when your roads separate, plunging the very fork that arrives in your path straight into your heart.

You may not be my final destination. Why worry about that anyway, when this journey is perhaps far more beautiful and enchanting?

I could sit here and list everything I remember and ache to relive, but the truth is that I miss the entirety of your being. Every bit of you — the excellent, the awful, and everything else in between.

Is it the way we’re completely different that inculcates this insane, unexplainable connection?

Amongst the entangled web of our individual marriages to work, lust, love and all the other factors that keep us apart, we still manage to trace back the weathered route that led us to each other in the first place.

I can’t emphasize this enough: love yourself the way you deserve to be loved.

I love you in languages you don’t comprehend. You love me in a language I’m aching to understand. I love you across continents and you love me against the fabric of time.

You’re a mistake. There’s no way around it. We’re a mistake.

Know this, survivor: your battle and your struggles are valid and important, as are you, in your entirety.

I suppose that’s why I remember everything about you. 

Is it because you’re an impenetrable wall, with layers of cement and brick that bruise my unarmored entity as I try to break through?