Unlived

I am a congregation of unfinished lives.

When I close my eyes, I see them — all the men I never became, standing shoulder to shoulder in some celestial corridor of what-ifs, waiting neither in grief nor accusation, but in quiet companionship.

One of them is a renunciate. He speaks rarely. He lives beneath the sky and prays not to gods, but to stillness. He is a pandit, not by ritual but by rhythm — the rhythm of the sacred breath, of mantra and memory. He knows peace, the kind that smells of sandalwood and silence. I have touched that life, once, briefly — in the way I once touched the Vedas — not to understand, but to feel what I was missing.

Another is a professor — pale-eyed and half-wrinkled from pages and pens. He teaches philosophy in a sun-drenched university town. He has long dialogues with younger versions of himself who arrive as students. He drinks bitter black coffee and writes letters he never posts. He is alone, but never lonely.

Somewhere in a colder city lives the lover I never became — the one who said yes when she asked for forever. He works in a newsroom, returns home with ink on his fingers, reads poetry out loud in the kitchen. They fight. They make up. They grow old together. I visit him sometimes in dreams.

There's also a revolutionary — wild-eyed, speech heavy, purpose burning. He gave up family and fame. He leads marches that are never covered on television. He knows that the system won’t bend, but he still screams at it with all his heart. He has scars. Some of them on his skin. Most of them invisible.

And then there’s the hermit — the one who left it all. The boy who walked into the Himalayas and never came back. People think he died. But I know better. He dissolved. Into winds, into scriptures, into stars.

I’ve loved them all. I’ve betrayed them all.

I never had the courage to choose. Or perhaps I had the wisdom not to.

Because each of them is a limb of my soul — and I, this half-shaped man who writes, am not their failure, but their witness.

I walk carrying their voices. Their hungers. Their renunciations.

And maybe, just maybe — when I finally come undone — I will not be remembered as a man who lived a great life,

but as the one who heard all his unlived ones calling…

…and didn’t turn away.

We Were Never Lovers, Yet Everything Was Lost

We were never lovers.

There were no midnight confessions, no trembling hands folded into each other’s palms, no declarations to the stars.

And yet, what passed between us could not be confined to friendship, nor described by the dry language of fate.

It was something ancient. Something hovering just beyond articulation—like a word trapped forever on the tip of the universe’s tongue.

To know her was to feel a quiet ache beneath the bones—an ache that resembled longing, yet never dared to bloom into it.

She and I danced on the edge of something immense.

And we never jumped.

But oh, how the world shifted in that pause.

There are some silences so loud they shape the course of things. Ours was such a silence.

A soft severing. A wound dressed in grace.

At a moment—fragile, fleeting—she wished for it.

For loss.

Not in cruelty. Not in arrogance. But in weariness.

Perhaps the weight of “what might be” became heavier than the comfort of “what is.”

Perhaps she feared the mirror I held too steadily for her to shatter.

And so, she stepped away. Not with anger. Not with goodbye.

Just… absence.

A quiet undoing of a bond that never found a name.

I bore the aftermath not like a heartbreak, but like an unspent storm.

I did not grieve the end of a love story—we never had one.

I grieved the death of a possibility.

Of a sacred union that would have asked for no performance, only presence.

She may have lost someone who would have worshipped the soil beneath her self-doubt, who would have read her silences like scripture.

But what I lost—what we lost—was something far more irreplaceable.

The world lost a softness it so desperately needed.

A tenderness that could have unfolded into poems and prayers,

Into a quiet revolution of warmth.

Our separation was not merely a personal sorrow.

It was a cosmic misstep.

A fracture in the universe’s deeper narrative.

For what we might have become—together—was not just love.

It was light.

And now, that light lies unlit—somewhere between what was felt and what was never said.

And that, I believe, is not just my loss.

It is the world’s.

To Love Her Was to Be Undone

To love her was to be undone — slowly, and with full awareness.

Not by betrayal, nor cruelty,

but by the quiet weight of being misunderstood.

She did not see the ache behind my stillness,

nor the trembling restraint in every word I never said.

She thought me unwell, obsessive perhaps —

but what she called madness was simply this:

I had no self left outside her.

She had become breath. Pulse.

My days moved as her shadow did.

And still, I asked for nothing.

Even when I was burning, I folded my pain gently

so it would not disturb her peace.

She never truly looked —

or maybe she looked through the eyes of others,

who never touched my silence,

never knew how I worshipped her in ways

that felt more like prayer than possession.

So she left — and I let her.

I bore the blame, her doubt, her silence.

If hating me made it easier for her to live,

I gave her that too.

But the wound remains.

Not because she went,

but because she never knew

that someone once loved her

so completely,

he forgot what it meant to be a person

without her.

If Ever There Were an English Mushaira...

If ever there were an English mushaira,

it wouldn’t begin with applause—

but with a silence that settles like soft dusk upon a tired city.

No spotlight, no raised hand—just a voice,

spilling like warm tea into porcelain twilight.

There’d be no declarations, no stage bravado—

only the gentle unfolding of metaphors,

like a lover untying the knot in a letter

they’ve read too many times to count.

A poet would rise not to perform,

but to confide.

And we would listen—not to respond,

but to remember something we had forgotten

in the bustle of being.

Perhaps someone would speak of grief

not as a tragedy, but a companion—

and another would turn longing into a landscape

where no country has borders, and every silence is sacred.

There’d be no winners. No final round.

Only verses—draped across hearts like shawls in December.

And somewhere in the back,

someone would whisper, “How strange... I’ve never heard English ache like this before.”