Where Is The Body?

You tell me
our love is dead.
Then where is the body?

I've been looking for days.

I checked
the crook of my neck
where your head still fits
as though it had measured itself
against my bones.

Nothing.

I looked beneath the bed
inside the old suitcase
where the dresses
still wait with their tags tucked inside
beside your loud Havana shirts
we bought because
we swore we'd wear them
on our next holiday.

The dresses are there.
So are the shells from Puri,
a handful of sand caught forever
in the seams of the bag.

Waiting is there.
The body isn't.

I searched the kitchen.
The coffee mugs
your cousins gifted us
our faces printed awkwardly across them.
We called them tacky,
then somehow they became
the only cups worth drinking from.

Mine is chipped.
Yours has faded
until your smile now
looks almost shy.

Every winter
they still wait
for the ginger tea
you used to make
before I even admitted
I was coming down with something.

The tea is gone.
The habit still remains.

I opened the steel almirah.
Between old LIC papers,
wedding envelopes,
and a packet of incense
that has forgotten
which festival it was bought for,
I found the duplicate key
to a flat that belongs
to someone else now.

We kept it anyway.
As if memory
might one day
fit a changed lock.

Still…
No trace of the body.

I checked the balcony
where the money plant
has climbed the same railing
we leaned against
every evening waiting for the rain.

If love is dead,
why does everything still behave
as though it expects you home?

Maybe
I've been searching
in the wrong places.

Last day when we met
you laughed.
I laughed too.

For a moment
it was so easy to believe
that nothing had changed.

Then the laughter ended.
Neither of us
Reached for the silence.

We simply
let it sit between us
like a third person
who had been living here
longer than we noticed.

You held me.
I held you back.

Once,
that would have been enough
to set whole constellations alight.

That day,
It was only warm.
Not cold.
Just...not home.

Maybe this
is what I mistook.

I expected death
to arrive all at once—
with broken plates,
shouted words,
doors closing,
someone leaving.

Instead,
It came quietly.
It learned our routines.
It folded the laundry.
It remembered birthdays.
It sat beside us
while we watched television.
It smiled
in family photographs.

Until one day
I realised
we still knew
how to love each other,
but no longer
how to belong to each other.

Today
we stand
at Howrah Station.

Your train
Waits on Platform Eight.
Mine on Nine.

We could stay here
holding hands
until both trains leave,
mistaking missing our lives
for saving our love.

Or

we could kiss,
say goodbye,
and run.

Because love
was never a prison.

Perhaps
that is why
I never found the body.

Some things
do not leave
a corpse behind.

They leave
two people
who still know
Exactly how to hold each other…

and finally,
how to let go.