They say men do everything for the woman they love.
I never believed that—
thought dislike was fixed,
unchanging as the sky above.

I thought when you said no, you meant never,
that taste and time could not conspire,
that people stayed the same forever,
unchanged by want, untouched by fire.

But that isn’t true, is it?

It’s been four years of knowing you,
three and a half of loving you through.
I say was—yet still it’s true,
some part of me still leans toward you.

But you aren’t the man I loved back then,
or maybe you are—just rearranged.
Same bones, same voice, same quiet grin,
only the wanting has been changed.

You watch the theatre now. You stay. You like.
You call it beautiful, call it right.
Do you remember Swan Lake at night—
when you told me, find someone else, and I swallowed the slight?

You watch it now with someone new,
turn moments into something rare.
Experiences you once outgrew
now bloom because she’s sitting there.

You sit in cafés you once called tacky,
order hazelnut lattes without shame.
You don’t flinch, you don’t mock me,
don’t call me South Kolkata like a name.

You go on dates. You trace new starts.
You wear a tattoo on your skin.
Ink where once I held your heart—
proof of the man you grew within.

I wish you were this version then.
I wish the timing had been kind.
I wish I met the now of you
instead of loving the almost kind.

But wishes don’t bend time’s decree.
They ache, they hope, they learn to wait.
So we exist in memory—
a lesson dressed as fate.

A man who learned what love could be.
A woman who showed how to begin.
You carried the knowledge forward with you.
I stayed behind where we’d been.

It’s been a year of letting go,
of finding hands I thought would heal.
Of telling myself I no longer know
the way your absence makes me feel.

I said I was done with tears and you,
that grief had finally run dry.
But here I stand—proven untrue,
still breaking when your world goes by.

You watch the theatre. You watch rom-coms, too.
You became what I prayed you’d be.
Just never, not once, with me and you.

I hope she is everything I was not.
Every softness, every ease.
And if you remember me at all,
let it be kindly. Let it be at peace.

In faded gold. In quiet blue.
In gentle light, in borrowed hue.
The way I still—
the way I always—
think of you.