FOREVER ENDED YESTERDAY - by Khairat Abdul

It did not end with thunder,No storm tore through my chest.It died…..quietly,Like a candle that decided it had burned enough.And yet, there's this guilt in the hollow,Guilt for the ashes that no longer glow,For the pulse that no longer stirs when your name brushed against my thoughts.Once upon a time,I swore I would love you until the very end,And I swear I meant it,If only you had allowed me to keep that vow,But love, that traitor,Slipped out of my body silently,No heads up,left no note,No apology.You broke us first,Split the vow in half and scattered it into years.Still I kept my half,Folded it neatly into guilt and called it devotion. Now, I can no longer pretend.Your name is a dead flower between my ribs,And I am tired of watering it.But the guilt —Oh, the guilt gnaws softly,Like a memory that refuses to rot,Like a ghost rehearsing my promises aloud,Like a wolf incapable of finding it's way back to the pack.I never meant to stop loving you.It happened suddenly,One night when the moon refused to rise,Because the moon knows your name right from start,And if I am to bury you,The moon has to as well.Some nights,I still whisper your nameNot out of longing,But because guilt needs a shape to kneel beforeThe walls remember what my heart has long forgotten,The fabrics remember,The night remembers,Even the dates— they rememberThey echo the vows I made too loudly,As if forever was something I could call mine,As if hearts were obedient things.Nostalgia haunts me a lot these days,I want to run away.You left first, yes,But I — I stayed for way too long,I kept waiting for the wound to speak,For the promise to resurrect itself from the ruins of what we destroyed.Now I feel you only in the absence,A hollow beneath my ribs where guilt builds a monastery to what once was.I light no candles there.I just sit and bleed, quietly,Because love has manners when it leaves.I used to think breaking a promise was a kind of death.But I have learned that,Sometimes it is survival disguised as betrayal.Sometimes the only sin is pretending your heart still beats for a ghost.It is strange, isn't it?How something that is still alive Can haunt us as though it were a ghost. And yet,When dawn sets in,I still flinch at the thought of your name,As if my Lord will ask me:“Why did you stop loving what I once placed in your hands?” And I —I would have no answerJust silence,And the faint fragrance of a promise that died without a sound.And now— today,I do not seek for peace,I seek only to remember how it felt before love decayed into obligation,Before guilt made a home between my pulse and my prayer I press my ear to the silence,And it whispers—Low, accusing and alive.It says;You promised. You promised. And, yes I did.But what do I owe to a ghost that stopped calling my name two years ago?Yet,I still carry the burnt fabric of that promise,Wrapped in memory,Stitched with what ifs.Sometimes I think guilt is the only proof that love once lived here.I hate how kind I am to it,How I cradle the ache like a relic too holy to discard.Perhaps this is my punishment too,To keep loving the echo—The one true friend I know,To weep for a feeling that will never return.Every heart must answer for its betrayals.Mine does so in whispers,In poems and letters that will never be sent,In nights I spend dissecting the anatomy of a vanished love.And if the angels are listening,I hope they record this not as sin,But as a kind of confession,That I too,am human,That I loved,And that somewhere between love and loyalty,I lost myself.

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