Remember Me?

The secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Grief sits in my throat like a phantom made of salt and shadow,

pressing down with relentless, invisible hands,

suffocating me with the weight of every word I never spoke,

every plea that was too heavy to carry past my lips,

and though they say the soul leaves the body through the throat,

mine stays lodged there, a trembling, half-dead thing,

although eager to escape from this agony of living without you,

trapped between what I was with you and what I’ll never be again.

Every breath feels like a betrayal to the devotion I buried with you,

like stealing air from a world I no longer belong to,

and if death had claimed you, if the earth had taken you from me,

I would have gladly let myself unravel, followed your shadow

into the places where the lost things go,

out of the kind of devotion that erases itself without question,

because to love you was not a choice —

it was a certainty written into the marrow

of my bones long before I understood the ache of it.

But this — this quiet leaving, this unbearable distance,

this silence you gave me in place of your voice,

it mocks the kindness of death itself.

It is grief without a grave, mourning without a body,

a wound that refuses to bleed out or close,

a sorrow that festers because it still hopes to be seen.

You went so far away, and now the air around me hums

with the echo of your absence, as though the walls remember you

better than you remember me.

Wouldn't you choose me?

Wouldn't you choose me?

Wouldn't you choose me?

Wouldn't you choose me, if there was a storm at your door,

and my name in your mouth was the only word left?

I ask it of the wind, of the aching quiet,

of the spaces between stars,

but you do not answer, and it is this silence that devours me,

this wordless space where I fear the truth grows louder —

that I was nothing lasting, nothing unforgettable,

a fleeting warmth you let slip through your fingers

because you knew better than to hold anything that burns.

I take great pains to keep you dignified in my memory,

to shape you into a man worth all this ruin,

to cradle the softer version of you against my ribs

because the sharper truth would carve me open too deep.

You never told me outright, but I know, I know —

I must be so terribly easy to replace,

so forgettable in a heart that beats in survival’s tempo,

in a world that does not stop for the breaking of one girl’s heart,

or the ending of her life.

There will be others who will love you with simpler hearts,

with easier lives, with no ghosts in their blood,

with no sharp, unhealed places aching for your touch,

with no madness clawing at their insides each time your name is spoken.

Let them endure what I have. Let them bleed as I’ve bled.

Let them try to fill this cavern you left behind,

stand where I stood — aching, waiting, breaking quietly

in the hollows of my own body while the world pretended nothing happened.

Let them carry this storm, this ruin, this relentless want

that claws at your absence like a starving animal.

I dare them.

Let them slit their wrists so you can drink their blood to survive,

as I did — willingly, without hesitation, without question.

Let them drain every last shard of their soul,

pouring it into your hands like holy water meant to keep you alive.

Let them take a thousand wounds, a hundred betrayals,

a lifetime of sharp-edged words and colder silences, just to be near you.

Let them stagger beside you, their hearts torn open,

smiling through teeth stained with their own pain,

hoping it might be enough, just once, to be chosen, just to be near you.

Let them crawl through the glass I have swallowed.

Let them stitch themselves together with trembling hands

only to unravel at your feet.

Let them endure it — every ache, every stab, every cruel absence,

until their eyes blur with exhaustion and grief,

until their hands reach for you in the dark,

and you, as you do, slip quietly away

the moment they close their eyes.

And when they wake to find you gone,

let them know what it is to be me.

Let them learn that this kind of love

doesn’t leave you whole, doesn’t leave you alive —

it leaves you haunted, a ghost chasing after a man

who was never meant to be held,

a love story meant to rot quietly in the dark.

I dare anyone to love you with the same unholy, bone-deep ache,

to wake up screaming your name into the unkind dark,

to beg the sky for mercy and still crawl back for more.

Let them think it’s easy to love a storm until the winds tear them apart.

Let them think they are different, until they find themselves

haunted by you in every stranger’s face, in every silent hour,

until they too choke on grief shaped exactly like you.

Not because you're perfect, but because they have seen all of your flaws,

all of your darkest sides and still chooses you unflinchingly.

For what is a love that idealizes which cannot accept the ugliness in each other?

No one survives this kind of love and comes out clean.

No one can carry this and remain whole.

And none of them — none of them — will love you like I do.

But they can try.

It is so easy to love someone when fortune favors you,

when no storm howls against your door,

when life has yet to test the things you claim to cherish.

But what of those of us for whom everything stands in the way?

What of those who would crawl through glass, through grief,

through their own undoing just to be seen,

just to be chosen, even once?

I have faith in you, still — in the love you carry for me,

tucked away somewhere deep beneath your ribs,

but my fears cling like shadows, because I’ve felt

how cold that heart of yours can turn when survival demands it,

when pride calls louder than tenderness ever could.

And still, I am glad that my spirit, my stubborn, aching soul,

can love you even as a phantom, even in the places

where my name has no weight and my face no memory.

I am glad that my soul brushes against you

as you move through your days, a presence you cannot shove away,

not even now, not even when you try to forget.

They speak of soulmates as if they are born whole,

as if fate forges them seamlessly, without fracture or flaw,

but perhaps soulmates are made,

through ache and ruin, through fire and vow,

the kind who find their way back to each other

after the world has tried its hardest to keep them apart.

Maybe the only things we carry to our graves

are our unspent dreams, our impossible loyalty,

and the way we dared to love someone

who no longer had a name for us on their tongue.

And God — how I loved you.

How I love you still.

Even now, in the ruin you left in your wake,

I whisper your name into the dark

like a prayer I no longer believe in,

as if somewhere, in some aching, godless corner of the night,

you might remember me too.

And still, in the ruin of it all,

I’ll whisper a final, useless prayer —

though I don't believe in mercy,

and I no longer believe in love,

I find myself hoping that one day,

even when it is far too late,

something inside you will crack open.

That you will wake from whatever fury or cold detachment

you’ve made your home, and suddenly —

like a blow to the heart — you’ll remember.

Remember the girl who waited for you in every empty room,

whose soul wrapped itself around yours

even when you despised the weight of it.

I hope you’ll think, oh God, what have I done?

How could I forget her?

How did I hurt her so deeply?

And you’ll reach for your phone, or your car keys, or the door,

burning to tell me every word you never said,

to confess every aching thing you buried,

to beg forgiveness from the ghost of the life we should have had.

But by then — of course — you will find

I have long since departed this earth,

slipped like smoke into the wind,

because that’s how these stories go, isn’t it?

We never realize until it’s far too late,

and those we wish to save, to claim, to love again —

they are no longer as we left them.

They are gone.

Gone with the wind.

© 2025 Inaba Tarek