All I ever wanted was to be heard—
not understood, not pitied—just heard,
as one hears a clock ticking in a locked room,
as one hears their own breathing in a dream that won’t end.

I am an ocean not of water,
but of thoughts that never learned to swim—
they drown me daily.
I am a sea of unwritten words,
each one begging for a voice,
but my throat is a sealed coffin.

I want to scream—
God, I want to scream,
but even my silence echoes louder than my voice.

I’ve buried everything so far beneath my ribs
that even I can’t find it anymore.
I am not a body—
I am a mausoleum of emotions never mourned.
I am the undertaker and the corpse,
digging my own grave with quiet nights.

Will the microphone ever arrive?
Or will I write these thoughts
on a letter no one reads,
stamp it with blood,
and mail it to a future I’ll never meet?

Love…
Love is a strange creature—
It does not knock; it breaks in.
And when it enters, it leaves ruin behind.
It terrifies me like beauty terrifies a mirror—
I cannot hold it
because I do not trust it.
How can I believe in something
so delicate, when I break everything I touch?

Sometimes I fear myself—
No—
I fear myself more than I fear death.
Because death is certain.
But I…
I am still becoming.

I do not live with Baba.
But sometimes, it feels like I am endlessly circling him in a city that does not notice me.

At the traffic light, when a man’s voice cracks the air, sharp and impatient, I always look. I always hope. Some foolish, bone-deep part of me thinks — maybe it’s him this time.

When I see a hand raised to order karak chai, or when someone softly says sirf roti dedo, something inside me leans forward, as if recognition can pull him back into the room.
But it is always a stranger.
It is always someone else.

When I hear Chacha murmur darwaza band karke sona,
When someone repeats dawai nahi leni,
I find myself turning, slowly, helplessly.
But the streets have learned to swallow voices. He is never there.

So I carry the ache home. I fold it into silence. I do not tell Mama the things that hurt, as though speaking them would make them heavier.
I drink chai until I feel full of him.

When I lose my temper and later peel the guilt off my skin, I know it is his shadow moving through me.
When love fills my chest like a storm, but the words die in my throat, I know it is him again—this unfinished sentence I am forced to carry.

He is in me.
He is me.

I have been told we are the same.
A cruel symmetry.
A perfect reflection split by distance.

How can you be so alike
and yet feel like you are forever walking opposite streets,
forever missing each other by a breath,
forever not quite arriving?

Somehow, I am always reaching.
Somehow, I never find him

I have been writing about you recently,
and it terrifies me.
I remember the days when my friends asked if I had a muse,
and I would laugh —
I am my poetry, I’d say.
But somewhere between the lines,
the ink stopped belonging to me.
When did my words become yours?
When did my soul slip from my grasp into your hands?

I am more you than myself now.
I wear your shadows,
and your silence shapes my breath.
I fear it’s happening again —
this heart of mine has begun to feel again.
I swore I had buried it,
but your voice stirred the dust.

I thought you were just another passing storm,
like the one who left before,
like all those who taught me
that softness was a curse.
But, God — I hope.
I hope you are not.
I hope you don’t prove me right.
I hope you don’t hate me
when you hear the truth
bleeding from my trembling lips.

I hope.
I hope.
I hope.
I really do.

Is there anything left for me
but to pray
that your heart, long wintered,
will bloom again?

You wrote yourself into my veins,
Not with ink, but with fire—
Each letter burning into my skin,
Each word sinking into my soul.

Your touch is a language,
An alphabet that rewrites me—
No eraser can fade you,
No time can wash you away.

I carry you like a wound,
A scar that never wants to heal.
Your love is a constellation
Carved across my midnight skies.

How do I forget a hand
That taught me the shape of longing?
How do I erase the voice
That taught my heart to sing?

Even if the seas forget their tides,
And the stars abandon the night—
You remain.
Indelible. Eternal. Mine.

She tells me—
There is no god in the sky,
no book written in fire,
no heaven waiting with open doors.
I tell her—
Then let me be your scripture,
let my hands write verses on your skin,
let my breath be the miracle
you never believed in.

She laughs—
soft, skeptical, beautiful,
like a temple abandoned to time.
I kneel before her,
not to worship,
but to whisper—
May your atheist heart find God in me.

Let my love be the unseen force
that makes you doubt your doubts,
the prayer you say in your sleep,
the faith you never meant to have
but somehow—
still feel.

And if one day,
you look at me
the way a sinner looks at salvation—
then I, too,
will believe in miracles.

The Lord must think I'm crazy...
Yesterday, my prayers were oceans,
waves crashing against the heavens,
pleading for all that I now hold.

I wept for love,
for doors to open like jasmine in spring,
for gold-stitched dreams to unfold in my palms—
and He listened.
The sky cracked, and blessings poured.

Yet now, I stand beneath this downpour,
dry as desert dust,
staring at the river I begged for,
afraid to dip my hands.

What is this disbelief?
This hollow ache in a heart that should be singing?
Is it that prayers taste sweeter when unanswered?
Is longing the only thing that ever felt real?

The Lord must think I’m ungrateful,
but I swear, I am only human—
a poet who prayed for the moon
and now wonders if it was lovelier from afar.