The Heights

Inspired by love that expired.

Leave me, but do not leave this earth—

do not vanish beyond the veil where even my prayers cannot reach you.

Do not dissolve into the endless dark,

where my hands will never again trace the warmth of your ghost.

Do not let your soul wander too far,

adrift in the hush of an unfamiliar sky,

where even the wind forgets to whisper your name.

Do not stray so far that I must fall asleep

just to feel the memory of your fingers

threading through my hair like a fading echo.

Do not go where I cannot find you again.

The wind howls through the moors, calling your name,

a restless spirit that will not be stilled.

The moon watches with hollowed eyes,

a silver witness to the ruin we became.

Perhaps this is the intimacy of knowing someone bone-deep—

you love them until love turns to ruin,

and ruin turns to hatred,

and you hate them with everything until you love them more.

Tell me, can this ouroboros ever be broken?

Can the wheel of devotion and destruction ever stop turning?

Or is this the nature of love—

a tether that tightens even as it frays,

a curse that binds even as it breaks?

I know life is meant to teach lessons,

but tell me—what am I meant to learn?

That love is a wound we must one day heal?

That pain is a teacher, and I must learn to let go?

No—

all I have learned is that love does not wither,

even beneath the weight of a thousand stabs to the heart.

That even if you cast me beneath your feet,

I would kneel upon the earth and still worship the place where you stand.

Tell me, what wisdom is there in a love that refuses to die?

A love that clings like a shadow,

that grows inside me like ivy,

like sickness, like scripture—

something no one wants,

yet something I cannot cut away.

If love is meant to be a gift,

then why does mine feel like an affliction?

Why does it remain,

even when the world has no place for it,

even when you do not want it,

even when I no longer wish to carry it?

Tell me,

if love is meant to be fleeting,

why does mine still linger,

like an unburied ghost,

waiting for a grave that will never be given?

—

O, Heathcliff,

if only you understood—

you are not the only one of us that truly loves.

You call it hatred,

but I know better.

Hatred is only love that has been left to rot.

You are consumed by it,

by the passion that coils like fire in your throat,

by the rage that beats in your chest like a second heart.

And yet, I suppose I should have known—

how foolish to expect the calmness of a flowing river

when I fell in love with a storm.

With its chaos.

With its wildness.

But I know you are more myself than I am.

We are not two souls, but one,

split and severed,

torn apart by the cruel hands of time.

You saw in me what no one else did—

they saw a proper girl,

all soft words and measured steps,

but you saw the tempest underneath.

A wildfire beneath porcelain skin,

a wilderness caged behind quiet eyes.

Because we are the same, you and I.

Both wild, both untamed,

both too much for the world to hold.

So we created our own world, didn’t we?

High on the cliffs where the wind sings only for us,

where the laws of men cannot reach,

where the world could not touch us

with its petty judgments and iron bars.

We built our kingdom in the haunted house on the hill,

where the woods grew thick with our laughter,

where the moonlight danced only for us,

where time stood still and the earth forgot our names.

And now that we are dead,

we haunt these halls together.

The wind still howls through the moors,

but it carries our voices now—

warning, wailing, whispering—

keeping all others away from our land.

No one will live here.

No one will take what was ours.

Because the Heights still remember us,

because the cliffs still bear our footsteps,

because the wind still carries your name in my voice.

Because the world may forget us,

but this place never will.

Because we are more than ghosts,

we are the storm,

we are the wild.

And the Heights are ours,

now and forever.

© 2025 Inaba Tarek