The weight of words I never speak,

Of what I ache,

Of all that’s lost and cold and bleak.

For grief’s sake,

and that which I blindly seek.

Full of woe I cannot show.

My soul is hollow,

and my heart hangs low.

Full of love, with nowhere to go.

Bursting,

hurting,

turning over words,

where fading memories are stirred and blurred.

Behind my back,

the past still glows.

It reminds me of joy,

and of woe –

The chokehold of a ghost.

Full of love,

with nowhere to go.

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Nowhere To Go was originally published in Beyond Lines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When i am in stillness –

I have time to think.

All I do is think.

I think

of the wall,

the path,

of what is ,

what almost was , and

of what has

slipped behind me –

behind my shoulders..

growing colder, older.

In stillness.

I am most awake.

Sparks

of remembrance

rise.

The path behind lies frost-bitten,

like dry leaves …

strewn with the remnants of former selves.

The silence –

it listens,

and if I listen patiently -

it answers back to me.

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When in Stillness was originally published in Beyond Lines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the stillness, we meet ourselves.

There is a version of me that only appears in stillness.

Not in conversation.

Not in motion.

Not in the noise of obligation.

But when the world quiets – when the phone is down, when the room is dim, when there is nothing left to distract me … something opens.

Or perhaps something breaks.

Stillness is not peaceful.

It is precise.

It lays everything out.

In stillness, I see the wall in front of me – the limitations I pretend not to notice. I see the path behind me – the versions of myself I’ve already shed. I see what remains. I see what has dissolved.

And I feel how much colder memory becomes with time.

There is a particular ache that comes with getting older. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just subtle erosion. You begin to realize how much of life exists only behind you. How many moments will never be revisited except through reconstruction.

We keep moving so we don’t have to measure the distance.

But stillness measures it for us.

It brings forward the things we didn’t say. The people we didn’t keep. The warmth that once lived in our hands and no longer does. It presses gently – not violently – but persistently.

There is a storm that lives in that quiet.

Not loud. Not chaotic.

But heavy.

It sits in the chest like weather waiting to turn. It carries the taste of iron – of words swallowed too long. It reminds you of love you still feel in the shape of its absence. It reminds you that some names never fully leave the body.

And here is the strange part:

Even after loss.

Even after regret.

Even after the slow cooling that time insists upon —

The heart still reaches.

It reaches toward what hurt it.

It reaches toward memory.

It reaches toward the thorn.

There is something almost humiliating about that kind of longing. To know something wounded you and still feel tenderness toward it. To know something ended and still carry it carefully inside you.

Maybe that reaching is not weakness , maybe it is proof.

Proof that beneath the ash, something still glows.

Proof that even in erosion, there is devotion.

Proof that stillness does not just expose loss … it reveals depth.

When everything is quiet enough, we meet ourselves without defense.

Yes, it hurts.

But there is something sacred in that kind of encounter. Something honest. Something almost romantic in the way we continue to love – even in solitude, even in silence, even when no one is there to witness it.

Stillness does not undo us.

It shows us what remains.

Stillness does not undo us.

It shows us what remains.

And what remains is the heart – that is bruised and trembling, tender, stubborn,is still daring to reach.

I was supposed to un-love.

Rather to hate –

to be nonchalant, to scoff, to not want.

I wanted so much to hate,

to hate, to hate…

but fate above

pounds a syncopated rhythm,

more like

a prison…

still stinging

still clinging

to my blood.

In dreams that stretch –

an edge,

a reach,

a touch.

Never,

never, never enough.

I swore

to wear indifference like armour

at my breast,

to fear, to sneer,

to starve the need

that would not let me rest.

I vowed to hate,

and to learn the butcher’s art,

hacking love from my heart.

I wake with teeth marks on my tongue

from biting back that name…

the sheets, a salted sea of sweat

my pulse, a maze of flames.

I was supposed to close the book,

be done.

Yet each page I burn bleeds ink that will not run.

So here I am –

callous, with cinders in my heart

roughly shoved —

for as long as there is time and space,

I cannot un – love.

“Un-Love” was originally published in Beyond Lines on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.