Quote by Agha Shahid Ali: “At a certain point I lost track of you. You needed me to live somewhere else.”

Love sometimes requires letting someone go — even when you don't want to. The speaker isn't describing abandonment; he is describing the particular grief of loving someone whose life must be lived without you. Loss is not always a failure of love. Sometimes it is love's most difficult expression.

Ali published The Country Without a Post Office in 1997, during a period of intense military conflict in Kashmir. The collection used personal grief and love to speak to collective loss and displacement, as hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits had been forced to flee the Kashmir Valley.

Kashmiri-American poet, born in New Delhi in 1949 and raised in Kashmir, whose ghazals in English brought the classical Urdu form to American poetry. His collection The Country Without a Post Office lamented the violence in Kashmir with devastating lyricism, and he taught at many American universities before his death in 2001.