I Should Have Followed You  

"Can I still call you Dorothea?"—even though the black and white lines in the paper reduce you to the habit you wore, arrange you into silence, a name and surname surrendered to the cloistering of lilies. Somewhere beyond this obituary, the grown children you once taught trace grief into their office desks, their minds recalling your half-remembered lessons. The others—those who once marched beside you—remember the compadre who chose devotion over struggle, who vanished into the ghost dust of old revolutionary dreams.  

Once, you were a believer who marched along Che and Fidel, a woman with a true north compass. You were never reckless, never a ghost in Havana’s dusk. You spent your nights writing, sealing letters to revolutionaries. You drank in hope like sugarcane.  

Then, the cause hardened. The slogans lost their breath. When Fidel called the people gusanos (worms) in a moment of drunkenness, you knew you must leave the revolution and Cuba behind. It was a certainty.  

You rooted yourself among the Miami exiles. We met on campus, arguing over a political opinion piece you wrote for the college newspaper. I argued that the Bay of Pigs operation was necessary. You wrote that it was a stupid exercise in democratic colonialism and was doomed to failure. And it was.  

Our love was a bickering affair. My adolescent jokes, mocking what I thought were your misplaced beliefs, chipped our foundation. I believed I was never lost. But I was orbiting a center I refused to name. After the revolution betrayed your faith, you retreated into a steady, quieter certainty—Jesus. He told you to press your palms into the smallest child’s hands. "Teach them lessons in your authentic voice," the command.  

I should have followed you. I could have stepped over the doubt that swelled between us, made a church of our mornings, sheltered in your certainty—if only you laughed more. If only I’d prayed less in jest.  

Now, my fig grows stubborn at my window, its roots strong, its love silent, and I, too, am nearing the end. I would light a candle, Dorothea—but what god still takes offerings from men like me? I will leave a hundred dollars in the box instead, fold your name into my palm, and call this devotion.

It's a clockwork — like the dances of phantoms in the hallways, in the glow of lights through the window at night. I stared like a burglar from afar, It's the fear and anger, that's keeping me restless — a reminder that I should sleep with one eye open, meager, furiously shame.

I understand how stubborn they are rewriting the history, as I try to recollect, catching trails like they were footsteps. Love is all they worship from the beginning of time, thus it crumbles them to dust.

Are they second - hand embarrassed? If I couldn't see the ghosts and shadows lingering everywhere, yet here I am nestled to all that fairy tale, for a momentary, and still plotting the sweetest lullaby. Did they haunt you too? as if it were a chunk to the armour or it counterfeits them?

Hamare khayalon mein din raat rehna,  yeh rok-e-pyar nahi to phir aur kya hai.

In our thoughts, you reside day and night, if this isn't proof of love, then what else is?

Jahan bhi To dekha, nazar-e-To hai, yehi giraftaari nahi to phir aur kya hai.

Whatever direction I look, my eyes meet the radiance of your being, if this isn't the ******* of love and devotion, what other surrender could there be?