Sometimes You Meet Someone, And It's So Clear So Immediately That The Two Of You, On Some Level, Belong

musings on april

Sylvia Plath (Leon Dabo), Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. E. Cummings, Naguib Mahfouz (Edgar Degas), E. E. Cummings (Édouard Manet), Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot (Edgar Degas), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alphonse Osbert)

indigo, @solavey 

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

My love ♥️🧿

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke; "You See, I Desire a Lot,"

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. April 1929, featured in Selected Diaries

I gave you a love so vast it could have swallowed cities whole. I built galaxies in my chest just to make room for you, carved out pieces of my soul and called them home so you would never feel alone. I was there and offering, but you… you only ever loved the echo of me, the shadow I cast in your mind, not the woman who bled herself dry to be enough. You didn’t love me. You loved the idea of being loved by someone like me. And that was the slow undoing.

You were never really there, not when I shattered quietly in rooms we shared, not when I fell asleep hoping you would see me again, not just look at me. I held up the heavens for us while you watched, arms folded, eyes elsewhere. And still, I stayed. Still, I gave. Foolish, maybe. Devoted, definitely.

Now, that it’s all gone. I have crossed oceans of pain to reach a shore where your name doesn’t burn on my skin anymore. I am somewhere better, freer, lighter. And just when I have stitched myself together with gold thread and midnight prayers, you come back.

You come back with a whisper of apology, a handful of words you never had the courage to speak when I was drowning right in front of you. Why now? Why always after?

It is the cruel theater of time, isn’t it? The final act where ghosts knock at your door once you have already exorcised them. People see your worth only in absence, crave your presence only when it is no longer a gift they are entitled to. Love should never be a posthumous award.

And yet, here I am, haunted not by you, but by the echo of who I was when I loved you. And that is the deepest ache of all.

(Darjeeling’22)

There is something enchantingly beautiful about books kept in old wooden shelves. The rich, warm tones, often polished by years of gentle handling. The slight creaks of them as you pull out a volume can evoke a feeling of nostalgia, reminding us of the many hands that have turned those pages before us.

[November’24, The Bookshop Inc., Lodhi Colony, New Delhi]

Inferno by Dante Alighieri (translated by John Ciardi) Paolo and Francesca da Rimini | Amos Cassioli, William Dyce, Gaetano Previati, Gustave Doré, Ary Scheffer, Nicola Monti