A last poem about love

tannishtha
2 min readJul 11, 2023

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(written May 13th)

I don’t know how to love as if you are you and I am merely me.

I know only of the love where you become all of me,

charged in every particle of me, bleeding through every cell of me.

I know not of the love where I exist outside of loving you.

I know only of the love where I am, only because I love you.

where I live through every atom of me that loves every inch of you.

I know only of the love, where my only light is the twinkle of your eyes

and my only darkness is the hollow in your soul.

This year, I loved you little by little, slowly and steadily, and yet…

in a consuming, cataclysmic, camaraderie of our cankerous encounters,

burning, fueling, and foolishly cultivating naïve passions in my heart.

My love can be ephemeral, transient, and yet it felt eternal and infinite in the short while that I have loved you.

I know though, that I can love long, but I won’t, or maybe I will. secretly and silently, on my own, until self-respect arrives with its haughty little flag of sensibility.

But now that I am loving you, let me perish and be reborn, like the Phoenix,

in this cyclical infinity of feeling alive through death by unreturned love.

For it is in these ecstatic cycles of self-immolation, that I have truly lived this past half a year.

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tannishtha

picky polarities in pursuit of a dumb lil PhD (in Contemporary South Asian History)