I’ve loved you in seven lives.

But you only return in even ones—

with your velvet feet and famine hands,

as if absence were a skill

you perfected across incarnations.

In the first life,

I braided my spine for you.

Offered it like sugarcane

to the god of no answers.

In the second,

you arrived with a name I could not pronounce

but still carved onto my ribs

using a toothbrush and patience.

The third life,

you left during a monsoon.

I was a girl with glass wrists.

You poured red wine into my mouth

and called it a lullaby.

The fourth—

you stayed.

But only long enough to teach me

that love is a flood

that drowns only one.

In the fifth,

maybe I was a soldier,

maybe a flowerpot.

You were absence either way.

In the sixth,

I found you again:

this time as a boy selling bruised pomegranates

in a town with no name,

where grief tastes like rust

and mothers salt their prayers.

And now,

in this—

the seventh—

I wait,

spooning honey into my mouth

as if sweetness could summon you.

Because 

You were a boy with fireflies in your throat.

I was still learning

how to kiss without breaking.

Isn't it strange,

how grief always wears your coat

but never your scent?

You only return in even lives.

Maybe love is even.

Maybe I am always odd.


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