Mistakes

One day, from her lips, a question spilled, a whisper that echoed through the chambers of my being:

“If I knew my mistakes, I could amend them. Tell me, what are my mistakes?”

It wasn’t the complexity that made it hard; it was the weight, the truth in its simplicity.

I stood silent, searching for an answer— none came, not then, not ever.

Even now, I ask myself: What act, what word, what fleeting thought of hers could rise to the gravity of being called a mistake?

How do you ask the blind to describe the sea’s color? How do you ask someone mute like me to speak a lie they’ve embraced as their most faithful truth?

How do I tell her there was no mistake? That every fiber of my soul, my heart, still calls out her name?

This distance—an injustice that rends me. My body trembles, fearing it was never enough. My mind, a hollow vessel, fights with every ounce of strength to unearth a reason, a flaw, a fault—

To convince the love I bear for her to forget the aching void she left behind, to forget the contours of her face,

To summon a single failing, a crack in the perfection of her memory— to let her fade into oblivion, and grant my shattered heart some peace.

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