There is a cruelty in looking back at youth: it appears brighter than it ever was, sharper at the edges, as though time itself has polished its fragments while leaving the present dull. I remember the days when every hour felt charged, when love seemed both inevitable and indestructible, when we believed we could hold one another outside of time. We were wrong, of course, but wrongness then carried its own intoxication.

What strikes me most is not what we did, but how convinced we were that it mattered. Each gesture seemed final, definitive, as though the world were a stage built solely for our experiments in love and cruelty. The smallest word could pierce, the smallest kindness could redeem. Now I see those same gestures as fragile, provisional — the rehearsals of people who did not yet know their own limits.

And yet, part of me envies that blindness. Youth allowed us to mistake intensity for permanence, desire for destiny. We lived inside a fever without recognising it as such. Perhaps that is why it glows so brightly now in memory: because we never knew we were burning out.

There are songs that carry that illusion — the reckless belief that feeling is enough to secure a future. They played in the background then, and they still return now, in shops, in passing cars, in the shuffle of a playlist. When they arrive, I feel both a pang and a strange gratitude. For those songs remind me that once, at least once, I believed completely.

But what is youth, if not the practice of believing too much? We handed out promises like matches, striking them against any surface, marvelling at the flame, ignoring the burn. Now I see the ashes, the charred remains of those brief infernos, and I wonder whether it was waste or necessity. Did we need to set fire to ourselves in order to learn the shape of endurance?

I think of us then: how certain I was that your eyes held an answer, how easily I mistook silence for depth, distance for mystery. I see now that you were as uncertain as I, perhaps more so. But in my memory you remain larger than life, a figure clothed in inevitability, because memory insists on myth where reality offers only fragments.

And yet, despite everything, I do not resent it. Youth is not meant to be wise. It is meant to wound and to dazzle, to leave behind scars we later read like scripture. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the pulse of those reckless days — wild, unmeasured, impossible. It hurts, yes. But the hurt carries its own sweetness, as though reminding me: you lived once without caution, you loved once without armour.

Perhaps that is all youth is — not a period of time, but a texture, a rhythm of the heart that eventually breaks under its own weight. And when it breaks, it leaves behind the faint echo of a song: half triumphant, half tragic, but undeniably ours.

The word has always unsettled me: hallelujah. A word meant to release the soul, and yet for me it has always seemed like a hand pressed firmly on the chest, both blessing and restraint. I hear it in Leonard Cohen’s voice, cracked and tender, carrying with it not triumph but surrender — not exaltation, but the quiet recognition of how little we hold.

When I think of you, the word arrives unbidden. Not because our story was holy, but because it contained its own kind of prayer: fragile, incomplete, uttered not to the heavens but into the silence that grew between us. Every message I sent, every waiting hour, every line unsent — they were my hallelujahs, whispered not to be answered but simply to exist.

There are loves that burn in clarity, but ours was made of shadows. You moved in and out of reach, your presence flickering like a candle in a draught. And yet, even that half-light felt sacred. It astonishes me still how little one needs in order to construct devotion: a glance, a word, a trace of warmth. From so little I built a cathedral, and now I wander inside it alone, touching the walls that echo only my own footsteps.

I sometimes ask myself what it means to praise what wounds you. To sing hallelujah to absence, to emptiness, to the refusal of return. And yet that is what I did, and still do. Not loudly, not in joy, but in the muted tones of persistence: a faith that clings even when stripped of promise.

The nights were the hardest. Cohen’s verses would return to me then, circling like moths: love is not a victory march. No, it is not. It is a march of silence, a procession with no destination, where every step is both necessary and futile. To love you was to walk in such a procession, knowing it led nowhere, but walking nonetheless, because the walking itself was all I had.

Perhaps that is what hallelujah truly means: not glory, but survival. A hymn not of triumph but of endurance, the small dignity of continuing to breathe, to feel, even when the object of feeling has withdrawn.

I wonder if you ever sensed it — that for me, even the smallest trace of you demanded reverence. A message after days of quiet, your name on a screen, the sudden return of your voice like a door opening into light. Each time I received so little, and each time I gave thanks as though it were abundance. That imbalance was my creed; I did not question it then. Only later did I see how fragile it was, how absurd to worship echoes.

And yet, would I choose differently? I cannot say. For in that devotion, however one-sided, I felt alive. The ache was proof of life, the longing a pulse in the otherwise stagnant air. Without it, who was I? With it, at least I could sing, however cracked the song, however solitary the choir.

So I keep the word, though it unsettles me. Hallelujah for the nights without sleep. Hallelujah for the mornings that broke me open. Hallelujah for the love that gave nothing, and in giving nothing, still gave me a reason to continue.

And if, someday, silence deepens into forgetting, perhaps then the word will finally lose its weight. But until that day, I will carry it still — not as triumph, but as testament.

So hum hallelujah
Just off the key of reason
I thought I loved you, it was just how you looked in the light
A teenage vow in a parking lot
‘Til tonight do us part
I sing the blues and swallow them too

There are nights when I collapse into sleep as though falling through an unlit stairwell — not a gentle surrender but a kind of stumble, graceless and sudden. The body insists, dragging the mind behind it, though the thoughts still cling to the bannisters, reluctant to let go. On such nights, I carry you into the darkness, unwillingly, almost resentfully, as though you had taken up residence in a house I no longer control.

I dream of you in fragments. Never whole, never the way you were. Your hands appear first — not reaching, not even moving, only suspended, as if waiting for a command that never comes. Then your voice, though the words blur like ink left out in the rain. Finally your face, but it is turned away, or obscured by shadow, as though sleep itself conspires to remind me of what I cannot have.

Sleep, I have come to realise, is not a refuge. It is not the gentle surrender that so many speak of, but rather an interrogation, conducted in the dim light behind the eyes, where questions arrive without answers and images return without permission. To close one’s eyes is not to rest but to stand before a tribunal where the charges are never read, yet the sentence is always the same: to remember.

Each night I fall into it reluctantly, like a prisoner returning to a cell he knows too well. The body collapses from fatigue, but the mind resists, still rehearsing your gestures, still polishing the details of your absence. And when at last it relents, you are there, not as you were, but as some distorted version, reconstructed from scraps of memory and desire. I find you in corridors that do not exist, speaking words you never said, turning your face away before I can grasp it.

Dreams are cruel in this way: they do not bring the person back, only their outline, fragile as smoke. You lean in, but dissolve before contact. You stand close, but never turn your eyes toward me. In dreams, I am allowed proximity but denied recognition. And I wake with the weight of it — heavier than the day before — as though I had carried you across some infinite landscape, only to lose you again at dawn.

The sheets bear no trace of you. The bed is too wide, the silence too steady. Morning insists on the emptiness of things, and yet the body remembers what the world denies. My hands ache with the phantom of your sleeve; my mouth shapes the syllables of your name as though it had been spoken aloud in sleep.

I have wondered whether sleep is not a mirror but a trick — not revealing truth, but forcing the dreamer to repeat what the conscious mind already knows but refuses to accept: that longing has no object, that absence is more enduring than presence, that desire creates its own stage and plays out the same unfinished scenes until the curtain frays.

And still, night after night, I submit to it. Not because I choose to, but because to live is to sleep, and to sleep is to reopen the wound. What is strange — almost consoling, almost unbearable — is that in this repetition lies a kind of faithfulness. The mind does not let you vanish. It keeps you alive in fragments, in gestures without conclusion, in words without sound. To be haunted is, at the very least, to be accompanied.

But what kind of companionship is this? You are near, yet never mine. You stand in the doorway, always turning away. The intimacy is sharpened by impossibility; the tenderness is woven with cruelty. Perhaps this is the truth of love unreturned: that it finds its fullest form not in the warmth of presence, but in the cold precision of memory and dream, where nothing is ever resolved, and therefore nothing ever ends.

I wake with the taste of you still in the air — not your real taste, but the ghost of it, as if the dream had pressed something into my mouth before retreating. The pillow is cool, the sheets uncreased, the bed far too wide. Morning does not comfort. It is only another witness to your absence.

I once thought sleep could offer release, a kindness the day refuses. That perhaps unconsciousness would erase you, or fold you into some harmless symbol, stripped of weight. But no. Sleep is not an escape; it is a mirror turned inward, forcing me to watch the endless choreography of desire and loss.

And yet, there is a strange loyalty in the way you return to me each night. You appear even when I do not want you, even when I try to banish you with exhaustion or alcohol or the distraction of late-night noise. Still, there you are, stepping out from the shadows of my mind as though bound by some silent contract neither of us ever signed.

I cannot say whether this persistence comforts or wounds me. Perhaps both. There is a bleak intimacy in being haunted. You are nearer to me in those hours than you ever were in waking life, though even there you remain out of reach. I touch your sleeve, but it slips through me; I call your name, but no sound escapes. It is closeness without contact, love without consummation — a cruelty disguised as tenderness.

Morning arrives regardless, and I rise into the day with its residue still clinging to me. Sleep has not cleansed; it has stained. I walk through waking hours as if carrying ash in my pockets, aware of its weight though invisible to others. And yet, perversely, I do not wish to be rid of it. For if the dreams were to cease, if sleep were to finally grow empty, what would remain of you? What would remain of me? The light insists on reality: the unshared bed, the undisturbed house, the silence that thickens as the hours crawl on. And I, still carrying the residue of dreams, walk into the day like someone half-drenched, unable to dry off.

Sleep is not rest. It is a theatre in which the same play is staged each night, with the same ending, the same departure, the same hollow applause. I tell myself I will stop watching, that I will close my eyes differently, that I will not let you in. But the curtain rises regardless. The performance begins without my consent.

And so I endure it. Night after night, you arrive in incomplete forms, leaving me with the ache of unfinished gestures. And day after day, I rise with the knowledge that to be haunted is still to be held, however lightly, however painfully, in the orbit of another.

There are moments when the sky feels so wide it threatens to undo me. I would look up and wonder if you were looking too, somewhere else, beneath the same indifferent stretch of stars. It seemed foolish, almost childish, but there was comfort in the thought of our gazes brushing against one another across the dark.

I used to believe distance was a measurable thing: miles, hours, the price of a ticket. But what separated us was not geography; it was the silence that grew heavier with every day. Even when you wrote, even when your name appeared, the silence had already set its foundations beneath the words.

There were nights when I could not sleep, and I lay still, listening to the house breathe. In those hours, you drifted closer, not as you were but as my mind recast you: softer, slower, more willing. I knew it was a trick of longing, but I surrendered to it, because to resist felt like erasing you altogether.

The truth is, I wanted more than you could give. Or perhaps I wanted more than anyone could reasonably be expected to give. Desire is like that — it stretches, it demands, it presses against the edges of what is possible until the whole thing collapses. And when it collapses, you are left with the quiet ache of something that once seemed infinite.

I think often of how ordinary everything looked from the outside. Two people exchanging messages, two lives running on their own tracks, occasionally crossing. Nothing remarkable. Yet inside me it was an upheaval, a constant rearrangement of thought and feeling. The world turned, unchanged, while I unravelled quietly in its shadow.

Sometimes I imagine telling you everything, stripping the words bare of grace and disguise. I would say: I missed you so much it made me cruel to myself. I missed you so much I wore holes into the days, pacing thoughts I could not mend. But of course, I never said it. And now the chance has gone, carried away like a paper boat into water too wide to follow.

I have learnt that silence is not empty; it is dense, almost physical. It presses against the chest, it crowds the mouth, it makes even the simplest phrases impossible to voice. You lived inside that silence, and I lived just outside it, knocking lightly, waiting for you to open the door.

Across the universe, or perhaps only a few streets away, you must have lived your life untouched by these confessions. And that is the hardest part: to know that what tore through me left scarcely a mark on you.

But still, I look up. The sky remains, indifferent and infinite. I tell myself that it does not matter whether you are looking too. The act of raising my eyes is enough: a gesture that belongs to me, fragile, small, but mine.

There are hours in the day when time itself seems to loosen its grip, drifting not forward but sideways. Those hours, for me, were always occupied by you. Not your physical presence — which was often absent, withheld, or delayed — but by the thought of you, the possibility of you, the small inventions of your gestures and words that my mind rehearsed like an endless script.

Daydreaming became a second occupation. While the city continued in its indifferent rhythm — trams dragging their metallic sighs across the rails, people queuing in lines with faces emptied of desire — I slipped into another tempo, one in which your arrival was always imminent. It did not matter whether you ever came; what mattered was the architecture of anticipation.

Chance creates our lives, but only memory makes them meaningful. My daydreams lived precisely between chance and memory: a rehearsal of what never was, grafted onto the scaffolding of what little had occurred. The mind stitches scraps into garments, and I wore those garments daily, invisible to all but myself.

I would imagine us walking side by side through the narrow streets, your laughter ricocheting off the stone walls. Or seated across from one another in a dim café, the smell of burnt coffee beans and damp coats filling the air, while your eyes rested briefly, almost accidentally, on my hands. These visions required no effort; they rose unbidden, like steam from a kettle, and just as quickly dissolved.

And yet, daydreaming is never entirely innocent. Kafka whispers here again: behind every act lies a tribunal, an authority that cannot be seen but can always accuse. Was I guilty of fabricating a version of you that eclipsed the real? Perhaps. But what is “real” when absence outnumbers presence a hundredfold?

In these reveries, you sometimes spoke words you never said, words I needed from you, sculpted from silence. At other times you remained mute, but your silence there was gentler, not the weighted furniture of reality but a kind of velvet stillness. I often preferred that imagined quiet to the brutal one you offered in life.

I remind myself that the line between dream and daydream, between imagined and lived, is thinner than we think. A jazz record can play in a deserted room, a cat can disappear into an alley that leads nowhere, and suddenly the ordinary becomes porous, admitting other dimensions. In my case, you were that porousness: the door slightly ajar, the possibility of stepping into another version of my own existence.

I sometimes asked myself whether these daydreams were a form of betrayal — not against you, but against myself. Turgenev would have understood: his characters are often caught between yearning and resignation, between the dignity of truth and the sweetness of illusion. Perhaps, like them, I knew I was choosing the softer lie, but still I chose it.

The days grew thick with these private visions. I carried them into work, into queues at the post office, into the empty hours before sleep. They accumulated not like memories but like dust: almost weightless, but impossible to remove. And when at last the day closed and I lay in bed, I realised I had lived two lives at once — one in the shared world, and another in the fragile country of my imagination.

If I close my eyes even now, I can enter that country again. Its climate is mild, its streets always half-lit, its inhabitants few. You are always there, though never fully reachable. And perhaps that is the essence of daydreaming: not to possess, but to circle endlessly around the thing one cannot hold.

So I drifted, half-asleep while awake, alive yet suspended. And in that suspension I discovered something cruel but undeniable: that sometimes the imagined life feels more vivid than the real, and that the heart, left unattended, will choose colour over truth, illusion over emptiness.