The age that has gone —
I remember: one night I was a madman for you,
my tongue a bell of fever
ringing your name into the dark.
All night I burned in my own body,
and at dawn, still trembling, I asked the world —
Are you safe?
Perhaps I could have made you understand.
But understanding is a shallow thing.
You would never have drowned
where I drowned every day.
You were busy — maybe with another voice,
another hour that wore a softer light.
In the gallery of your life,
I was the painting turned toward the wall.
You never wondered what I looked like.
You never saw that I was still breathing.
And now… the age has gone.
What I wanted — only once —
was for you to stop your leaving
long enough to see me.
Not as a shadow.
But as the room that held you
when the world went cold.
Look —
my eyes are still a night-watch over
every fever you never caught,
every prayer you never heard.
Inside my ribs, a small lamp burns —
your name, still lit, still waiting
for a guest who never arrives.
If you looked, you would see
an empty chair worn smooth by waiting,
a door I forgot how to close,
and a man who still practices
your name in the dark.
But you never looked.
You were walking toward other dawns,
other hands that asked for less.
And I became a habit of your absence —
not a wound, but something worse:
a soft forgetting.
So I stood there.
Door open. Air free.
The path you never took
became my only home.
Now the age has gone.
Yet sometimes, without warning,
a fever returns —
not of the body, but of the memory
of a body that once burned for you.
And I find myself,
as if no time has passed,
whispering into the silence —
Are you safe?
No answer comes.
Not from cruelty.
Because the question itself
has become a prayer
with no one left to listen.
Only a rain without sound
falls against my window —
each drop a small, cold truth:
You are already gone.
But before you vanish completely,
turn once.
Not for hope — hope is dust.
Turn to honour the weight
of someone who once stayed awake
through an entire fever,
through an entire life,
just to know:
Were you ever, even for a moment,
held by a love that asked for nothing
except to know you were safe?