Echoes of the Unclaimed
Years have passed.
Psyche walks through a winter street,
Her hair streaked with silver and her heart still tender,
Still raw from the love that never stayed.
she smiles politely at strangers,
But in quiet corners of her soul
She feels a bow strung across her ribs,
and an arrow trembling with a name she cannot speak aloud.
Cupid moves through another life,
His golden wings folded beneath a mortal’s touch,
His laughter warm, his eyes tender,
But the nights are cold and empty.
Every heartbeat whispers her name,
Even when another rests in his arms.
Every arrow he fires carries a memory of her pulse,
A longing that cannot be regained.
One evening,
Psyche visits a garden where roses bloom even in frost.
She leans against a marble fountain,
Watching the stars mirror themselves in the water.
And, there…
Somewhere across time, across fate…
Cupid is watching the same constellation.
His hand brushes another’s cheek
while his soul aches for hers.
They do not speak.
They cannot.
Fate forbade it.
Yet in the spaces between their lives,
In the silent pauses of breath and shadow,
They feel each other
An invisible thread vibrating
with what might have been.
Psyche closes her eyes,
Feeling the echo of wings she once held,
The warmth of a kiss that existed only in stolen moments of eternity.
Cupid inhales the night air.
Feeling the pulse of a nymph who was once his world,
and a shiver runs through him
that no one can remove.
They are both still searching
For new flames,
For tender hands,
For love that could fill the hollow left by fate.
But they know, deep down,
That some hearts are never truly reclaimed.
Some loves are eternal in absence.
A wound and a wonder,
A myth that belongs to the stars
rather than to them.
And so they continue,
Living, breathing, loving in fragments,
Haunted and blessed by a bond
that destiny ripped apart
yet never erased.
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame: 4 am, Tagar, MIST, Mirpur Cantonment.