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.