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of triumph but of endurance, the small dignity of continuing to breathe, to feel, even when the object of feeling has withdrawn.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