The Scar of the Unstarted

It is a wound not carved by severing, 

No final, jagged tear, no breaking sound, 

But one inflicted by the hovering 

Of futures we refused to let be bound. 

We had no falling action, no clear close, 

No single, dreadful moment to define 

The end of something everybody knows; 

Instead, a delicate, dissolved design. 

It is the phantom weight of what was near, 

A deep incision from a blade unseen, 

A scar that forms from silence, not from fear, 

A hollow where a were should have been mean.

We lived inside a permanent delay, 

A space where morning lingered, day by day. 

The thread we spun was never tightly knit, 

But lay across the floor, where we would sit, 

And touch its texture with a cautious hand, 

Too close to sever, too far to demand. 

We traded whispers like a foreign phrase, 

Spent months within that conversational haze, 

And paused at thresholds where a kiss might start, 

Then stepped back quickly, guarding every part. 

A gentle current, always pulling south, 

A silent promise held within the mouth.

The true attrition lies in truths unsent, 

The cargo of confessions left unvoiced. 

The architecture of a life unspent 

Is what the grieving spirit is coerced 

To wander through, a ghost in empty rooms, 

Hearing the sound of doors that never swung. 

We built our heartbreak not on broken tombs, 

But on the ballads that were left unsung. 

The boundary we set was made of glass, 

Reflecting back the easy path we spurned, 

A constant knowledge of the things that pass 

When two decisive corners are un-turned.

There is no funeral for what didn't start; 

No stone to mark the place the feeling died. 

It simply lingers, lodged within the heart, 

An echo chamber where the wishes hide. 

A true goodbye provides a certain grace, 

A bitter clarity that sets you free, 

But this cessation is a vacant space, 

A question mark fixed for eternity. 

You are the shadow that attends the sun, 

The perfect possibility held in frost, 

The battle lost before it was begun, 

The heaviest price for what was never lost.

This wound is deeper than the final word, 

For endings carry wisdom, hard and plain; 

They grant permission to the pain incurred, 

And offer solid ground to purge the strain. 

But an unwritten story bleeds anew, 

Each time the mind revisits the first page. 

It’s not the closure that we struggle through, 

But the perpetual, unreleased stage. 

The finished chapter, though it hurts, is read; 

The one unstarted keeps its sharpest sting— 

It is the haunting of the love unsaid, 

The beautiful, imagined life we cling 

To, knowing that the us we might have been 

Is worse than any final, tragic scene.

- Khushi  Kaul