You have no acknowledged place in my life—this truth I have known for a long time now.
There is no separate gleam of light bearing my name across the canvas of your days, no reserved form of address for me in the language of your relations. And yet, does the inner life of a person ever truly dwell only within the bounds of recognized names? So much is born there—things without social identity, without declared legitimacy, and yet whose presence cannot be denied. You are like that within me—unannounced, unapproved, and yet inevitable.
I am the stranger standing beyond the threshold, the one no one calls inside, yet whose footprints are etched into the dust. And that dust? It is the most sacred—for it bears the beloved's trace.
I have never wished to possess you; rather, in trying to understand the emptiness into which you came and settled, I learned to know myself anew. Once I thought the silence within a person was an unused expanse—wind enters there, dust gathers, time passes through. Now I know that even silence has a secret architecture. Someone can come and build a dwelling there in such a way that nothing changes from the outside, yet every wall's echo within is transformed.
You came to my life like that—not as a storm, not bearing any theatrical illumination. Rather with such a deep and gradual presence that its effects are not understood at first. Like invisible moisture in an old house that slowly changes the scent of wood, makes heavy the light trapped in window frames—so you altered the tone within me. I remained the same person, and yet I was no longer who I had been.
When bamboo stands in the forest, it is silent. Cut it down, bore holes through its body—it sings. Before you came, I was that silent bamboo. You are the opening in me—through which, when wind enters, melody emerges. But melody is only another name for sorrow.
Perhaps the most difficult form of love is one without certainty, without an established outcome, without even a simple language to give itself a name. Call it friendship and you diminish it; call it love and the word becomes too bright with glitter; call it closeness and its inner burning is missed. Some truths become smaller the moment they are defined. Whichever way you turn, that light falls—can it be captured in any language? Ninety-nine names are known—the hundredth remains hidden. That hiddenness is what has kept creation alive. My feeling about you is like that hundredth name—beyond utterance, and yet most true.
I have many times tried to convince myself—to be bound to someone in this way does not perhaps mark the sign of wisdom. To pour out one's depths entirely for a relation that has no certainty, whose very social vocabulary remains unbuilt—is this seemly? Yet the heart has its own logic, which does not appear before the court of reason. It writes its own verdict, issues it itself, and bears the sentence alone.
The moth knows the fire will burn it—yet it flies. For to the moth, living does not mean staying safe; surrender to the light is its only morality.
The moth knows it will burn. Yet it flies. Because burning in light is truer than remaining unburned in darkness.
What has grown within me about you is not the surge of sudden emotion. It is a long-enduring, unbroken, layer-upon-layer accumulation—an inner continent with molten heat beneath, coolness above, countless unknown deposits in between. From outside I appeared normal—I would speak, mingle with people, even laugh sometimes. For there is an etiquette to falling apart.
Not all destruction comes with dust rising; some destruction works in silence—in the way a person speaks, walks, laughs, in the habit of turning their eyes away. But deep within, I knew my center of feeling had shifted. There is an undercurrent running through my thoughts, forever flowing toward you. This flowing escapes no one’s notice by eye, yet it commands the entire weather of my inner life.
I am so dissolved into your existence that if we were separated, I would become vapor—invisible, yet present in every breath. As salt dissolves into the sea—after which you cannot say which is salt and which is water. I have spoken your name so many times that I have confused it with my own. This flowing is no longer some accidental weakness—it is the climate of my being. I have grown accustomed to it, yet I cannot fully accept it either. This very hesitation is my permanent geography.
The strange thing is, I do not grow angry at you. This anger that does not arise is also a kind of torment. Because rage allows people to live easily—it creates distance, builds accusations, seats another in the chair of blame and frees oneself. But where there is no room for accusation, there pain becomes far more pure, and therefore far more merciless. I know that life is not always a translation of human will. People often walk down paths they have not fully chosen themselves; time, circumstance, duty, doubt—all together carry them in an invisible current. So I have never been able to judge you. Only to feel. And that feeling, precisely because it is without judgment, has made you more enduring within me.
What heart is capable of taking all forms—it can be a field, an hermitage, a doorway—does such a heart know judgment? It only knows how to hold.
It is true that I have not possessed you completely. But sometimes not-possessing becomes a kind of possession—when it creates a lasting resonance within the heart. You are absent yet part of my present. Your absence is not mere emptiness; it is a kind of active presence that establishes itself anew in me each day. Because what feels new each day must also be lost anew each day. I do not set about forgetting you; rather, I am learning to carry you. And this carrying has become a secret art of how I live my inner life.
It is certain unfinished things that live most powerfully within us—a half-written sentence, a stopped melody, a name not called out at a doorway. Where perfection ends, incompleteness echoes and endures. You too are such an echo within me—something that cannot be finished, yet cannot be called a proper beginning either. Perhaps the seeking itself is the true possession—not the finding, but the transformation that comes through the seeking.
When I see you turn your attention elsewhere, when I hear your voice bend toward the distance, there arises in me a tremor both gentle and profound for which there is no simple name. It is not jealousy, for there is no pride of possession. It is not resentment either, for I have never made any formal claim. Rather, it feels as though in that quiet chamber within me where I have kept you, the light has suddenly dimmed—as if some long-held inner season is withdrawing from itself. The pull toward you within me is not a noisy longing; it is grave, deep, a low vibration running through veins. It is like an invisible thread, one end fastened to my chest, the other end lost in some unknown region of you.
You know or you don’t know—when that string is plucked, its vibration lingers in me.
Then I convince myself—a human being is no one’s sole property. And yet the heart, clinging still to its own childhood’s unguarded simplicity, desires this: that the one toward whom it has leaned in silence all these years might turn back, just once, to look.
When you turn your gaze elsewhere, a season shifts inside me. I understand—your eyes are my weather. When you don’t look—it is winter. When you do—all of spring becomes mine.