The Small Sun That Found Me

By Vusurumarthi. Akshaya Srija

Your presence hurts me more than absence ever did —

the weight of you presses where quiet once lived.

The memories we made rewind like old film,

scenes that belong to us both and no longer fit within me.

I cannot find myself inside those moments;

I became you in the edits, the pauses, the shared lines.

They hold us only as a pair — never one, never alone —

and in that togetherness I lost the shape of me.

You were my happy company, the small sun that found me

and pulled a smile from the deepest dark.

You taught me I was human enough for joy,

enough to love and to be loved back again.

You gave me courage to wander inward,

to see what I might grow into, to trust that one day

the quiet would settle and everything would be okay.

For a while, you were my promise.

But promises can cut. Now you are the reason I cry —

tears that carry love like a stone sinking slow.

Though you are gone, the ache remains: I am still in love.

Your thought unthreads me; my senses fray at the edges.

You lifted me from the dark, then left me suspended

over a hollow that has no ladder.

My soul calls for you like a bell without answer;

my heart holds a pressure that will not let go.

I know you cannot return, even if you wished to.

I ask the question that has no shelter: why did you leave

this small world without the last small mercy of holding my hand?

That absence is the wound; that question, the ache.

Now I see what I could not name before.

This is love — not tidy, not kind in its logic,

but a fierce, doubled thing: saving and breaking,

a tenderness that both raised me and unmoored me.

Love here is memory that keeps us both alive,

an echo chamber where our voices refuse to die.

It is the quiet knowledge that what healed me also harmed me,

and in that cruel truth I hold myself together and fall apart.

This is love: the light that found me, the shadow that remains.

Both are true. Both are mine to carry.

By Vusurumarthi. Akshaya Srija