Near the end of his nuniyyah Ibn Zaydun declares: “I cry faithfully, though you have shut me out / The phantom is enough, and memories suffice.” By now, the appearance of the tayf al-khayal—the qasidah’s visit by the phantom of the beloved—has become rare. An ancient way of interpreting loss, the khayal is tied to longing, remembrance, and nostalgia. Like the classical atlal, which represents the figment of a place, the khayal is the shadow of a person, which does not lose intelligibility, but rather marks a moment of creative production that collapses the sequential into simultaneity. I read another appearance of the khayal in exiled Syrian poet Rasha Omran’s collection al-lati sakanat al-baytah qabli, which revitalizes the image of the phantom-beloved to inhabit the intimate space of the home. I argue that Omran problematizes both the spatial category of homesickness and the temporal aspect of nostalgia through the khayal which signals a break in the linearity of time as well as in its agitation of corporeal affiliation. I use the tayf al-khayal as a critical lens with which to read Omran’s phantom and to do so, I rely on readings of the khayal in early Arabic poetry in order to mobilize a robust understanding of this phenomenon of the nearly-departed beloved in the double sense of its diaspora. Like the phantom, the poet’s distance is both temporal and spatial. However, unlike the silent khayal, the poet, although parallels the displacement and journey of the phantom, nevertheless utters a point of poetic departure. Drawing on theorizations of loss—particularly the discursive implications of displacement—I ultimately argue that by intersecting subjectivity and space in a time characterized by the absence of space and locality, Omran’s work questions the politics and ethics of territorilization. Furthermore, my reading of classical Arabic poetry alongside modern poetry performs a similar critique, unsettling and interrupting the temporal boundaries of separation that have come to characterize Arabic literary studies. I emphasize that despite the apprehensions and attachments of the khayal, its association with loss paradoxically allows it to register what is lost, thus precipitating a mode of expression that re-places loss and becomes the condition of a new political agency.