The False Lover – Poems by Tara

The False Lover

I met him when the night had collapsed into itself,

a time when even the stars had forgotten how to shine.

He arrived, not as a man,

but as the idea of salvation in human skin.

I didn’t fall in love.

I sank.

He wasn’t beautiful.

He was familiar.

Like a dream I’d forgotten but kept waking from in tears.

He spoke the language of longing,

and I mistook it for connection.

He looked at me like he saw me.

But now I think, he only saw his own reflection

in the glass of my eyes.

Love? No.

I think I became a canvas,

and he painted himself across me until

I forgot what I looked like without him.

He let me believe we were two halves.

But he was whole, dangerously whole;

full of himself, like a god

who demands worship but never offers grace.

And I?

I was the offering.

Soft. Bleeding. Willing.

He left without noise.

Narcissists don’t need closure,

only admirers.

I sat with the question:

Was it love?

Or was I a stage and he the actor,

reciting lines he’d used before,

with conviction so real it broke me?

I don’t remember when I fell.

That’s the cruel part.

It wasn’t sudden, it was slow.

Like mist rising. Like madness blooming.

And now I know.

He never loved me.

He only loved

the echo of himself

that I had become.

The Hollow Friend

I knew her, or I thought I did.

She entered my life not as a person,

but as a need wrapped in skin,

a presence that only existed

when absence frightened her.

She reached for me

like a hand finds a wall in the dark,

not for love,

but for proof that she wasn’t alone.

And when the light returned,

she no longer needed walls,

or me.

She saw me only in fragments,

through the narrow lens of her want.

To her, I was a surface,

something smooth enough

to reflect her face

but never deep enough

to disturb her.

I spoke in plural;

we, us, together,

but it collapsed always

into the singular weight of her I.

Even her tenderness was imperial.

I got you.

I found you.

I have you.

Words that sounded like love,

but were only territory.

She feared loneliness,

but not in the way we do,

not like hunger or cold.

She feared the absence

of her own voice in the world.

And so, she filled every silence

with herself.

I became

her lamp,

her mirror,

her echo.

She drained me not out of cruelty

but out of survival.

And I let her,

because I thought

being needed

was the same as being loved.

I called myself her friend.

But I was more battery than being,

a current to keep her glowing

until she found a brighter source.

And now,

I feel like a star

remembering it once burned.

She was the moon,

shining only with stolen light,

always alone,

always cold.

She adored mirrors.

Not for vanity,

but for reassurance.

The way you check

you still exist.

I was just another surface.

Another silence she filled.

Another shadow she used

to define her light.

And when I dimmed,

when I asked to be seen,

she turned away.

She was blind to anything

but herself.

Not by fault,

but by nature.

There are people

who name themselves God

in the church of their own minds.

You do not love them.

You survive them.

The Reflection I Feared

Meeting them

was like stepping into a hall of mirrors.

Each face,

a twist, a demand,

a desperate echo of self-love,

impersonating as connection.

The he who adored himself

through the love I gave,

then she who held me

only as a backdrop to her light;

I began to fade between them,

smudged at the edges,

lost in their reflections.

And I forgot, for a time,

that I was already

surrounded by mirrors.

That the world does not need,

to be made of glass,

for it to reflect you back to yourself.

A sound rose,

low, inward, human,

a question,

like a pulse in the dark:

Am I becoming one of them?

Because I have been the collateral.

I have been the light they borrowed,

the silence they filled.

And I fear,

with the clarity of someone

who has lived in their orbit,

becoming what broke me.

When I stood before the mirror

not hanging on a wall,

but glued to the back of my mind,

I saw not my face,

but fragments.

A shadow of their movements in my own.

My heart

trembled.

Struggled.

Because the cruelest thing

narcissism leaves behind

is the question

of whether you have caught it

like a sickness

in the blood.

The Room I became

I held onto that room for years,

not as a space, but as a part of myself.

I made it sacred. I kept it closed off;

because if anyone entered,

something fragile might break.

Inside were books I hadn’t touched in ages,

still smelling of time and distance.

The desk was where I left pieces of myself,

my diaries, a few precious books.

And in the corner, those red seeds, still resting as if nothing had changed.

Then he came.

He said nothing, just offered me the black bangles I once loved.

But even the silence of this place didn’t want him.

The cracks on the walls, the stillness, the creeping things - they rejected him.

He turned back, disappeared without a word.

And somehow, even that silence rang with the sound of my anklet,

as if something had been said after all.

The bangles broke in my hands,

and from the wound came blood.

It wasn’t just pain;

It was everything I had built

In that room falling apart.

The memories, the effort, the longing,

washed away like a house in a flood.

Now, I am without a home.

Just a bird moving through the world

with no sky of its own.

---

About the Poet:

Shermin Riyas, who prefers to be penned under the name Tara is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in the B.A. Programme at Jamia Millia Islamia, with subject combinations in Sociology, History, and Public Administration.