बख़्शे तू जो प्यार से, तो हो मेरी रिहाई

I thought the light was love,

The way her skin felt under my hands,

The ease of a summer afternoon.

But I was wrong.

This hollow, jagged silence—

Wanting to reach for a phone

That only leads to a ghost—

This is the real love.

It’s the part that stays

When everything else is stripped away.

The part that still wants to hold her

Even after she chose the exit.

I’m terrified of the day it stops hurting.

I’m afraid healing will feel like betraying

What once made us real.

Because as long as I bleed,

The love is still alive in me.

Grief isn’t a wound.

It’s a cast made of memory—

Heavy, restrictive,

Protecting something that hasn’t finished breaking yet.

I know now

The only reason it feels this bad

Is because it felt that good before.

If this pain is the price of loving honestly,

Then I was never overcharged.

This ache is proof I’m alive.

In the middle of the wreckage,

Stripped of the plans and the logic,

I am finally, purely human.

I’ll keep the ghost warm a little longer.

Not for her,

But for the man who was brave enough

To feel it all.

---

Author’s Note

I still love my ex. That truth exists alongside another one.

I hate her—and I hate everything her version of love stood for.

I hate a love that calls abandonment protection.

I hate a love that decides another person’s limits for them.

I hate a love that frames leaving as kindness and courage as burden.

I stayed.

I chose repair over escape.

I believed love was something you carried together, especially when it got heavy.

She believed letting go was mercy.

This poem isn’t written to reconcile, forgive, or understand that choice.

It exists because loving honestly came at a cost, and naming that cost matters.

The anger here isn’t cruelty.

It’s clarity earned the hard way.