The coin rolled on and on,
teasing the already finished
with fresh hope each time my phone
pinged with spam, family, work.
Not a single word from your side,
except maybe these clouds
that sit over June like unread messages.
I wanted to drop it into many open hats
of street musicians, let it ring
against someone else’s afternoon.
Even today, I don’t think I am
truly done.
My faded map of the moles on your face,
remembers sometimes the way hands
cupped cheeks. Each time I redraw
the map with a singular wish
to hold you close.
My map of moles on your face
draws itself sometimes;hands
remembering cheeks before I do.
Each time I redraw it, the distances
keep getting larger.
One was broken. The other, reckless. One was greedy. The other, naive. It started with a touch. Every love story begins the same way: a moment of recognition. Eyes meet. The soul knows, there, the mislaid key from lifetimes before. And everything changes, though you won’t understand how much until later.
I was lonely before you.
What works in your fingers? What stuck in your voice? What is it in your skin that sets my whole being on fire? Whose song do you have on your lips?
After comes the middle. Where poets and certain songs live. Where the ordinary earth becomes ethereal. Thoughts and bodies fly. Freedom in the space between heartbeats. Lightness. Warmth.
Sometimes that warmth lasts a lifetime. Sometimes you get a tiny repeat glimpse, a gesture, a turn of phrase and you’re falling all over again.
Sometimes, years later, you’re grateful it ended. Because the wound through which the light pours would never have come to be otherwise.
But here’s what nobody tells you about the after.
The breath never quite settles. You remain lost to the world. They’ve found another way to get to heaven. But here you are, still playing their song. Still looking at bridges, birds and trees. Waiting for someone to see how special you are for seeing those birds, for naming them.
You walk streets where no one knows the version of you that they did. You name the birds to empty air.
And if there is no end to love, then this is what it costs, the ache that won’t close. The wound that never scars over
This city glows beneath the night
a glare that offers no direction,
lit by screens that spark brief delight
in distant love and absent connection
This life aches for something to hold,
a tether m: emotional, real, and bold
But it wrestles with a quiet desire
for weightlessness, to float higher
In the amber hush, I sit and dream,
you return, my constant theme
We know the years will march ahead,
we’ll meet, converse, embrace what’s said
that thought, my comfort, softly spread
Yet still, I yearn for consequence:
for dreams, for thoughts, for acts immense.
And I wish the same for you
a life of meaning, raw and true,
with moments no money can pursue
They cheated you of softness
Of the easy kind of love they hand out
like candy in storybooks.
They cheated you of warm hugs at
the end of hard days,
of a voice that said, “I see you, you matter.”
They left you to build yourself with empty hands,
to stitch your own heart with threads made of silence and longing.
And you grew a garden in the hollow
they left behind.
You taught your soul to stay tender,
to give freely, to believe in love
even when it showed up late,
or small, or not at all.
You are a miracle they forgot to imagine
Some evenings, I tell you the stories
I gather from the streets of Paris
how the city itself leans in to listen,
each cobblestone carrying
the hush of someone’s tenderness.
At Kléber, in the crush of evening,
a couple tangled in farewell
clung to the threshold of the metro gates.
The boy walked backward,
his eyes fixed on her face
as if it were the only compass he had,
his retreat echoing
all the departures,
all the nights that ache toward return.
On Boulevard Saint-Germain,
an old pair drifted beneath the rain,
their umbrella tilted like a wing.
The awnings wept, pavements puddled,
yet their shoulders brushed
with the calm certainty of promise fulfilled.
They moved as if tomorrow
were already folded into today.
Love leaves its traces on everyone.
But in these streets
I see how we choose, daily, perhaps
to let scars lie silent,
or to build again
from the ash’s fragile flicker.
You told me once of your old boss.
I pictured him on Pont Neuf at dusk,
the Seine glittering like scattered coins beneath him,
leaving tokens of devotion on his phone
for the wife who wrestled each dawn
with the stubbornness of her own body.
Perhaps a ritual, perhaps vanity.
But what steadied him
was gratitude for her breath,
for her bare feet across kitchen tiles,
for her insistence on staying.
As steady as the baker in Belleville
brushing flour into the street at dawn,
as patient as the waiter in Montparnasse
stacking chairs long past midnight.
And I remembered
the love stories we inherit
centuries carved in epic stone,
gilded halls and painted ceilings,
where love meant kingdoms fallen,
wars kindled, lives consumed
at the altar of passion.
Where devotion burned itself to ruin,
and nothing remained but ash.
But here, in Paris, In Mumbai
in the stories we gather for each other,
love is not empire but reminder.
It is the bell of Kanchipuram
it’s soft insistence repeating:
I am glad you are here.
You told me too of another,
a friend with a camera
who framed his wife’s face
through the shadow of cancer.
I saw him in Montmartre,
where the streets slope skyward
and painters lift their canvases to the light.
Each photograph was a vow remade,
his tenderness as unshaken
as the musicians beneath the Métro,
filling the tunnels with song
whether anyone listened or not.
And again, love was not vow,
but practice. a choosing,
again and again:
at a café table on Rue de l’Odéon,
in the line at the boulangerie,
at Pont Alexandre III at twilight.
this person. this hour, again
Still, the old myths murmur.
They crouch in the gargoyles of Notre-Dame,
in the sandstone vignettes of Beluru
whispering that love must be grand
a spectacle, a battlefield.
That to endure,
it must leave ruins.
But perhaps truer courage
is in the smaller act:
to stay, to notice, to speak even when
words don’t come freely
And then you said the words
that broke me open:
I know the mistakes I made.
The shutting down.
The clamming shut.
And in the silence that followed
I thought again of Paris and Chennai
the boy backing into the crowd at Kleber,
the old couple dissolving in Saint-Germain rain,
Jasmines, temples, words, plentiful words
Just shadows, just echoes. Perhaps of a room
with a sacred key to unlock
an entire city
a place of ruins and restorations,
boulevards scarred and rebuilt,
light returning each morning
to find the shutters
opening once again, perhaps
If you knew the secret of fire
how it wakes in a spark,
how it grows, ravenous,
devouring forests and mountains,
fields and cities, centuries of stone and story
you might believe yourself prepared.
But still, you would not be spared.
Still, you would not be spared.
If you mastered the craft of quenching,
if you studied the chemistry of flame,
if you learned which water to pour,
which hand to raise,
where to stand, where never to linger
you might think you had earned safety.
But still, the fire would find you.
Still, the fire would find you.
And you!
you who carry the scorched wisdom of heartbreak,
you who swear you have learned its lessons,
you who whisper that you are stronger now
but still, no vow is given.
Still, no promise holds.
For the ash waits, patient.
The dawn reddens, merciless.
And the river, by law of being,
must surrender itself to the sea.
But still,
still, you fall in love
with the sea that swallows
rivers whole.
