𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗔𝗥𝗬: “The Treatise on Things That Never Happened” by Lyn Axzel G. Ganaba

Layout by: Summer Maggay

Published by: Mardin Rheyziel Nungay

Date Published: November 4, 2026

Time Published: 12:35 PM

Category: Poetry

Theme: The grief of awakening to the future you may never have.

 

I had a dream last night,

of a future that knew my name

yet refused to let me remain.

 

In that dream,

I kept reaching for the life I wanted,

only to watch it recede

like a horizon that only existed

from a distance.

 

I walked through histories

no archive had ever kept,

through lives that dissolved

before they were lived,

through rooms I entered only in sleep

and left before morning

could teach them how to exist.

 

There were words lingering

at the edge of our lips,

uncertain whether they wished

to become truth

or disappear with the night.

 

I have spent years mourning

these invisible ruins.

Not because they existed,

but because they could have.

 

There is a peculiar grief

reserved for unrealized things:

a grief without a date,

without a grave

without even a moment

to call its own.

 

It visits me in sleep,

wears my own face,

and beckons me toward the life

that possibility forgot to finish.

 

It asks no cemetery for permission,

wears no black,

and receives no condolences.

Yet when morning comes,

I carry its absence with me,

as though I have lost

something I once had.

 

I still think of the hand I never held,

the apology I never heard,

and the future that never learned my name.

 

Perhaps possibility is the cruelest architect.

 

It builds entire worlds

inside the human heart,

then leaves them unfinished,

as though hope itself

were only an abandoned blueprint.

 

And still,

I return to those unwritten pages,

not to rewrite them,

but to honor them.

 

And after wandering those unfinished worlds,

I finally saw the life I wanted

standing just beyond the door.

 

My hand instinctively reached for it.

The door opened.

Then I woke before I could enter.

 

For a moment,

the room was my only silence,

my hands empty,

and my chest was heavy with the ache of almost.

 

Only then did I realized,

I had been grieving for a future

before it ever had the chance

to become a past.

 

Perhaps that is what time does best:

it teaches us to mourn

not only what has ended

but what never began.

 

So let this be my treatise—

that absence is not the opposite of existence.

 

Perhaps the things that linger the longest

are those that were never given

the chance to leave.