I Dwell in an Imaginary Couple System

I profess to the world that I am unbound,

a solitary wanderer in the landscape of life.

Yet my mind has never truly been free.

It has always harbored a “you,”

a constant gravity I orbit

without ever admitting the truth aloud.

You are not mere fantasy-

you are a precise architecture of my longing.

You arrive in subtle gestures,

a smile across pixels,

a voice remembered in silence,

an understanding that requires no exposition.

Before I realize, you have insinuated yourself

into my rhythms,

becoming the first thought in the morning,

the quiet anchor before sleep.

I tell myself, perhaps convincingly,

that this is harmless, ephemeral,

that I am unclaimed, untethered.

But the system is cunning.

It entwines my consciousness

around someone who owes me nothing,

who exists in real life

and in my mind simultaneously.

It rewards me with ecstasy,

with inexplicable delight at the simplest exchange,

and punishes me with anxiety,

jealousy, and silent yearning

for moments that may never manifest.

I revel in the goodness of this connection:

the thrill of shared understanding,

the intoxicating intimacy without obligation,

the freedom to love without contracts,

the exhilaration of a soul meeting another

in the quietest recesses of being.

It is a heaven of pure emotional resonance.

Yet madness lurks in every corner.

For every joy, there is a shadow:

the incessant doubt,

the gnawing question of where I stand,

the hesitation before committing to any other path,

the tiny suffocations of hope deferred,

the weight of absence

that grows heavier than presence.

I imagine futures

we will never inhabit.

I trace kitchens, arguments, laughter

that exist only in my mind.

The brain does not differentiate

between imagined reality and lived reality;

it binds, it craves, it punishes.

The mind that once delighted

in this freedom now grows restless.

I find myself at once exalted and imprisoned,

elated by the nearness

and undone by the uncertainty.

I am addicted to the thrill

and tormented by the fragility.

When the inevitable dissolution comes,

there is no ceremony, no closure.

There is only the absence of what was never formalized,

the grief of losing something

that technically was never mine.

Society cannot witness this loss;

friends cannot console it.

I grieve in silence,

as if acknowledging it aloud

would make me appear weak, foolish, or sentimental.

And yet… I return.

Because for every sting,

for every pang of despair,

there is a corresponding ecstasy,

a depth of intimacy

that no conventional relationship could offer.

I dwell in this system not because I am reckless,

but because I am human:

drawn to connection,

desperate to feel,

willing to risk the tumult

for the splendor of being understood.

Perhaps one day I will tire of the oscillation,

of the exquisite cruelty of hope and imagination,

of loving someone

who is at once everywhere in my mind

and nowhere in my world.

Or perhaps I will learn

that the beauty and the madness

are inseparable:

that to feel profoundly is always

to teeter on the edge of loss and rapture.

For now, I remain here,

between what is tangible

and what is conjured,

between delight and despair,

a willing participant

in the ineffable, intoxicating, maddening

imaginary couple system.

“The constant deviation of my stances feels less like change and more like a silent disintegration of the soul.” Jayankarthika