Liturgy of an absence

It hurts to see you because of your beauty; it hurts even more to know that your mere appearance coincides with the loveliness of your being, that there is no artifice or deception in that harmony which wounds. But it hurts above all that this perfection neither belongs to me nor requires me, that it exists complete and self-sufficient in a world where my presence proves superfluous, and that even from afar it holds the power to rend me with the simple proof of your existence, untouched, while I bleed away in the contemplation of your fullness.

My knees bleed, and in this voluntary hemorrhage I find a persistent longing, one that stretches until the moment when the heart, that treacherous organ I no longer recognize as my own, ceases to propel the red flow through exhausted veins; they bleed because I have knelt too long in supplication before the altar of your absence, scraping against the rough edges of memory until the skin splits and the warmth seeps out, a deliberate draining that I crave to continue without interruption, emptying my body of every last drop so that this false heart might finally stutter and fall silent, releasing me from the tyranny of its relentless beating; I extracted it once from the hollow in my chest, opened it with surgical precision, scrutinizing its hidden chambers in search of the exact site where your name is inscribed, that echo which, when pronounced, awakens a virgin sting, identical to fingers closing over a rose whose beauty wounds without mercy, a pain that repeats in inexorable cycles, and yet I would invoke it ceaselessly, expending every remaining breath, eroding the lungs in the mere repetition of those syllables that outline the crack in my torso, while my eyes, on the brink of the sleep's abyss, track you with an urgency that distorts reality until it summons your illusory form, a vision that, even in its torment, binds me to this extinguished love, one that refuses to dissolve into nothingness.

In the stale air of rooms I no longer enter, where dust settles like forgotten accusations, I trace the outlines of shadows that mimic your gestures, each one a counterfeit that unravels upon closer inspection, pulling me into a sequence of false recognitions where the bleeding resumes not from knees but from the fissures in thought, and what I took for emptiness reveals itself as an infinite regression of presences, your name echoing not in flesh but in the architecture of absence itself, compelling the heart to persist in its futile rhythm against the weight of what was never truly lost.

And yet, I persist. I remain within this vigil that is neither entirely life nor entirely death, holding in my hands the heartbeat I once swore to abandon, as though in its obstinacy there were a secret form of fidelity. I come to understand that I do not bleed in order to extinguish myself, but to preserve the proof that I loved, that there was once a radiance that pierced my flesh and left upon it an irreparable mark. Perhaps the heart does not fall silent because its sentence is not to beat, but to remember; and within that memory, which burns without consuming itself, I find the only certainty that remains to me: that even what is lost continues to exert its dominion, not as presence, but as destiny.