These tears

are like a voiceless drift of petals

from some ruptured rose.

Innocence is a thing you never knew you had

until you lost it.

Until the sun is setting

over the city that was ours.

Like a sunset

fighting for its final glaring breath,

the memories of us as children,

thinking we were grown,

burn bright over every inch of this landscape

that is giving over to darkness.

We reached that milestone

that we were always aimed at.

But the year that we could finally say

that we had been in each other’s lives

just as long as we had not been,

you dawned a torch

and set fire to everything…

Every inch of what we spent all those years building.

And you said it was because you wanted a “new life”.

You told yourself it was justified.

And you re-wrote the story of “us”.

It is the killing of something so precious

that has turned these un-remembered heavens black.

But I have not forgotten them.

They haunt me in the darkness

and I sit by the flicker of the flame

that keeps on saying

that you’ll come back again,

knowing that just like everything else

that people have promised me in life,  

that too may be a lie.

We are separated now

by a parapet of hatred.

And behind that sorrow.

And behind that the fear

that I cannot live this life without you.

Because the truth that is still contained

within the pistil of my heart

is that

you

were the lightness of my life.