The stranger I weep for

I saw you once—no, not truly— a shadow beneath a flickering light, your sorrow etched in the silence between the tick of time and God’s absence. And yet, I crumble, utterly— as if your tears had long been mine, as if fate wrote your grief into the margins of my soul. You do not know me. You cannot. You pass, radiant and tortured, through the corridors of my mind like a ghost too real for this wretched life. Is it love? No—something more cruel. A fever. A punishment. A divine joke, where my heart kneels before a stranger, and begs to suffer. I am a sinner in your temple, pleading to a god who doesn’t look back. Still, I love you— in the kind of way that ruins a woman quietly.