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.