The Weight of Loving What Would Not Stay

Prose Poetry

By Anees Ul Ameen

I began carrying ghosts long before I knew how to name them. They arrived quietly, dressed as memories, pretending to be harmless. I let them in because loneliness has a way of mistaking familiarity for safety. Each one took a corner of my chest and rearranged it without asking.

You were the loudest of them.

I remember how loving you felt like learning a new language with no alphabet—only sensations. Jet-black thoughts nested behind my ribs, and I mistook their heaviness for depth. I told myself that pain was proof of meaning, that tenderness had to hurt in order to be real.

My heart fumbled constantly, fragile in ways I could not explain to anyone else. I wrote intimate chronicles just to survive myself, peeling back layers of thought that no longer belonged to me alone. Every word was a confession I never sent. Every sentence, a quiet apology to the person I was becoming.

You lived in my body more than my mind. In the way my shoulders curled inward. In the shallow breaths I took when rooms felt too open. Love distorted my perception, discombobulating my sense of self until I could not tell where I ended and where you began.

There is a violence in loving deeply without being chosen fully. It does not announce itself. It settles. It teaches the heart how to bruise silently, how to accept absence as normal, how to romanticize waiting.

I tried to exorcise you through language.

I unburdened a menagerie of ghosts onto the page—versions of us that almost survived, almost healed, almost learned how to stay. But exorcism is not release. Sometimes it is just repetition with prettier words.

Memory betrayed me gently. It softened the sharpest moments, blurred the warnings I ignored. I remembered your warmth more than your distance, your presence more than your withdrawal. Nostalgia edited the past until it felt kinder than it ever was.

My body knew the truth before my heart accepted it. It resisted you first. Tightened when your name appeared. Grew heavy when hope returned uninvited. The body keeps its own records, untouched by excuses.

Healing did not come as closure. It came as fatigue.

I grew tired of explaining myself to silence. Tired of loving potential instead of reality. Tired of shrinking so something else could feel larger.

Letting go felt less like release and more like grief rearranging itself into something livable. I learned that survival is not dramatic. It is quiet. It is choosing not to reopen wounds just to confirm they still hurt.

Now, I hold love differently.

I do not confuse intensity with intimacy. I do not call absence mystery. I do not romanticize inconsistency. Love, I have learned, should not require self-erasure to function.

Still, I carry marks.

You shaped the way I hesitate. The way I double-check affection. The way I question comfort. Some lessons leave fingerprints that time does not wash away.

But I am no longer haunted.

The ghosts have names now. They have boundaries. They visit less often. When they arrive, they no longer dismantle me. They sit quietly, reminding me of who I was—and who I refused to remain.

I am learning to forgive my heart for being soft in a world that rewards restraint. For believing that devotion could teach someone how to stay. For confusing endurance with love.

I loved honestly.

That matters.

And if loving you taught me how to survive myself, then even the ruin had purpose.

Author’s Note

This piece was written with the assistance of AI and carefully edited, revised, and finalized by Anees Ul Ameen.