The Nights You Came Poem by Mystic Qalandar

We dreamed in love,
we loved in dreams.

We never spoke.

Not before our parents,
not before the world
that waits for love
to announce itself
before it dares to live.

We loved—
and kept it behind
the closed doors
of unspoken words.

Then life made its choice
before we could make ours.

They gave your hand
to another,
against the longing
of your own heart.

And I remained
with all the words
we had never spoken,
and all the tomorrows
we would never share.

But night did not abandon me.

For three long years,
night after night,
you came to me in dreams.

You came
when the world fell silent,
when the day's loneliness
settled upon my heart,
when the burden of my studies
grew heavier
than I could bear.

You spoke of love.
You quieted my fears.
You gave me courage
when my own courage failed.

And when morning came,
you were gone—
yet something of your tenderness
stayed with me.

I do not know
what dreams are made of,
or how the heart
makes a voice
out of the silence of absence.

I only know
that you came,
and I found the strength
to carry on.

My books lay open.
My unfinished work
waited.

Somewhere
between the ache of longing
and the promise of another dawn,
I learned to continue.

I completed my PhD.

The world would see
a degree,
a scholar's name,
the fruit of years
of labour and thought.

But I would remember
the nights no one knew,
the words no one heard,
the love no one witnessed,
and the one
who came to comfort me
when she could not
be beside me.

How could I blame you?

Your love was not the wound.
Nor was your helplessness
a betrayal.

We were caught
in the silence of our own making,
and then in circumstances
neither heart could undo.

Perhaps we were too young
to speak when speaking
might have changed our fate.

Perhaps life had already
drawn its lines.

I will not ask
what might have been.

I will not accuse
the love that could not
become a life together.

For even in separation,
you gave me something
that separation could not take away:

the courage to go on,
the strength to finish
what I had begun,
the tenderness to remember
without turning love
into blame.

And so I keep
those three years
somewhere within me—

not as a claim on you,
not as a debt
you must repay,
but as a quiet chapter
of the life I lived.

You could not walk beside me
into the future.

Yet, in the long nights
of my becoming,
you came.

And I went on.

—MyKoul