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I have no life left to live, only pain. Work is my only escape, and my only way to fool myself.

I have nothing to do and nothing to enjoy and no one to live this life with. At work the day goes, and it fools me for a few hours. Then it stops, and what is under it is still there, and I go blank. Busy, then blank, then busy again, and it works only as long as I do not stop and look at it.

There is no way out. Whatever I am running from comes with me, and it is already waiting. I would have been alone in a new place, crying in a room, an empty seat at every table. The seat beside me is empty now, and it should not matter. It does. There is a hand that used to come to me and goes somewhere else now. There is a lie she told me, and she told it kindly. There is a promise she is still keeping, and it does not have my name on it. I count every one of them. Even in the silence of sleep, my mind hums with the melody of your name.

Baat hi nahin hui subah se. Subah hi nahin hui subah se.

It goes out the same way every day. That she is not alone, that I am here, that something in her day is on her side. I make sure it is warm, and I make sure none of what I am carrying shows in it. And under all of it, every time, there is a thin hope that one morning it comes back to me. Once… for no reason. Somebody types my name and says I am not alone either.

No matter how gently I speak, pain speaks louder.

I do not listen with my ears anymore. I listen with the pain machine. It does not hear her words. It hears the wound. A plain sentence comes in and it stabs at it until it bleeds, and then it hands me that one instead. Calm becomes criticism. Honesty becomes an attack. Silence becomes abandonment. I am not answering her. I am answering the fear. She is talking to me, and I am fighting a battle from another time.

There is a long list of things I am not allowed to do now, and I go through it most days. I cannot say anything to her. I cannot ask her anything. I cannot know anything about her life. I cannot call her. I cannot text her. I cannot send an emoji. I cannot see her. I cannot hear her. I cannot meet her. I cannot touch her. I cannot feel her. She does not know how much I want to be near her, for her to look my way. I cannot, and I will not. What I still could say, I do not send. Anything that would land on her as guilt, anything that would carry one gram of my pain into her day, stays with me. It used to be easy to say all of it. Now I weigh every warm sentence before it leaves me, and I read it back to myself and cry at it instead.

The one thing I can still do well is keep her safe from me.

I have hurt her for months. I made her cry every other day, made her feel worthless. Now it is my turn. I deserve this. I am ruining her. Everything I have touched, I have ruined, including her focus, her studies, her days, her nights, her sleep, her peace, her calm, her mind, her heart, her confidence, her smile, herself, everything… everything.

So I will not let it touch her again. None of my pain, not any of it. Today it touched her and I failed, and I will not let it happen again. There is only one person left I am allowed to hurt, and it is me. She will call and she will text, and I will not answer. All day I am dying to hear her, and not answering is the worst thing I can do to myself. That is hurt. And if she does not call, that is hurt too. The one thing that does not hurt me is the one thing that hurts her. Not the crying, not the missing, not the nights. She will not carry a second of it. I will keep all of it on my side of the wall, and if she comes looking for me, she will find only quiet. So I cannot let it touch her again… I cannot. Promise.

My crying is not pain. It is love with nowhere to go.

So I have no way left to give her any of it except crying. Crying is the part of loving her that costs her nothing. It is the only form of it I am allowed to keep, so I will keep doing it, and she will never see it. There is a poem scratched onto the walls of my throat. No one has heard it…

I loved you against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against everything that told me not to. I want that written down somewhere. It is everything I need her to know and the one thing I cannot say. Every time I cried in front of her, it was not hurt. I have no other language for it.

I am not moving on and I will not. I will not let her go inside me, not ever, and I will keep this hurting me. I am not afraid of the unknown. I am afraid of the known coming to an end, and I have decided to be afraid of it on purpose, every day. I am not going anywhere. Wherever she goes, I will come right after her. I will wait for her calls and her messages, and I will cry for them, and she will not hear about it.

I stopped telling her the size of it because the size of it was hurting her. But let it be written here, in the only place I still say things. We were supposed to be forever. Maybe the love I was promised was… this pain.