It astonishes me still, how love can occupy a room so completely and then, without ceremony, leave it hollow. The air itself changes; once it carried sparks, now it resists the simplest flame.

There was a time when speaking with you felt like placing my hand against a warm pane of glass. Even through the barrier, heat passed. We made plans, unanchored but luminous, and the future seemed pliable, like clay waiting for our fingerprints. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, that warmth cooled. Conversations grew shorter, diluted, as though our words had been stirred into too much water.

I thought of James Taylor then, of Fire and Rain, that lament for what arrives and vanishes, for what we wish to hold but cannot. Fire: the brilliance of our first laughter in the car park, songs tossed back and forth like gifts. Rain: the gradual erosion, the quiet flooding of silence, the messages unanswered, the endless waiting beneath indifferent skies.

Some evenings I would scroll back through our exchanges, as though evidence might restore presence. But the words felt strangely displaced, like letters found in an attic long after their sender has died. Memory reshapes itself; it polishes what should stay rough, and in doing so creates a fiction more fragile than truth.

I asked myself — perhaps too often — whether the decline was my fault. Did I lean too much? Did I offer too little? Kafka whispers here: in his world, guilt is certain even without a crime. I felt condemned by some unspoken law, a regulation I could never locate in writing.

One night, while listening to the rain hammer against my window, I imagined you standing outside, soaked, unable to find the door. It was not a dream, nor entirely fantasy; it was the kind of vision that slips in when solitude becomes too sharp. I almost opened the door. But of course, you were not there. The street was empty except for water carving small rivers along the curb.

And yet, the memory of fire would not extinguish itself. It flared up at odd moments: a phrase of a song on the radio, a colour on the street that recalled your jacket, the faint smell of grapes in a supermarket aisle. The past intruded without permission, leaving behind its embers.

Kundera reminds us that love is bound not only to presence but to its recollection. What survives is not the reality, but the echo — and echoes, though faint, can linger far longer than the voice that made them.

So here I remain, between fire and rain. Fire that promised permanence, rain that dissolved it. Neither wholly gone, neither wholly present. Only the stubborn ache of something that once burned brightly and now falls steadily, drop by drop, refusing to end.