Ashes Between the Lines

I have lived too long folded in silence,
creased edges pressed together
like lips that never parted.
Once, I was alive with ink—
ink that bled like arteries,
ink that trembled with the urgency of confession.

She wrote me in a fever of midnight,
her hand shaking against the candle’s breath.
Every word was a wound stitched open,
every line a pulse of longing
too raw for the daylight to bear.
I knew her heart better than her own chest did,
for she carved it onto me
with a devotion that burned
and a fear that froze.

I waited,
sealed but never sent,
listening for the footsteps
that might carry me into his hands.
But she tucked me away instead,
into the coffin of a drawer,
beneath scarves and shadows,
as if love was something
that must be hidden to survive.

Years passed.
The world forgot her urgency,
but I did not.
My paper yellowed,
my edges curled like tired sighs.
Still, the words inside me
weighed heavier than stone,
each sentence a coal still smoldering,
threatening to set me ablaze
from the inside out.

I am not merely paper.
I am the ghost of a confession unsent,
a cathedral of silence,
an inheritance of what could have been.
Even now, when fingers trace me,
I tremble with the heat of what I carry—
love too heavy to deliver,
yet too fragile to destroy.

If fire touched me,
I would burn gladly,
my ashes finally whispering
what my sealed lips never could:
That love, though never spoken,
was real enough to scar.

- Khushi Kaul