I question
A prose submission by Saranya Bhat
I wonder if losing you was my fate or my fault.
Was loving you my curse or my cure?
It’s not as if I gained nothing from you. The compliments, the love—they live on in me, etched into the smallest parts of who I am. Every time I open my hair, your voice whispers through my ears, as if it still belongs there. Every time I smile, your love pulses through my heart, like an echo of something I can’t let go of. Every speech I write, every shop I visit—I unconsciously buy something for you. And then it stays with me, unopened, untouched—forgotten, yet impossible to discard.
I think If I were to strip your essence from my life, it would feel incomplete, like a puzzle with missing edges. My room would feel barren without your keepsakes, and my heart would be adrift without your memories to anchor it. But I still wonder—was what we had a flower meant to be preserved or a wound never to be touched? Was it beauty waiting to be cherished, or pain best left undisturbed?
The voice that echoes in my mind, I can’t make sense of it. Is it a comfort, or is it a warning? Am I meant to love myself the way you loved me, to nurture those pieces of me that you adored? Or am I supposed to flee from the world you built around me, a world where I sometimes felt more like a visitor than its owner?
If everything were to crumble, if I were stripped bare, how much of myself could I truly call mine? My favorite food, song, color, book—it’s as though they weren’t chosen, but inherited. Not deliberately, but inevitably, through you. How much of me exists outside the influence of you?
Maybe you were always meant to become a part of me, a love that shaped me, that I carry with me forever. But even so, was losing you my fate or my fault? Did I raise my voice to be heard, or did I raise it to silence yours? Were my fears born of your actions, or were they projections of my own?
Was it your love that faltered, or my thoughts that slipped?
Was I truly harmed, or was I the one who harmed you?
And if love like ours was meant to save me, why does it still feel like it’s breaking me?
inspired by her past failures
Reach out to the writer: Bhat.saranya on Instagram
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