Whispers
Come closer
This distance is not easy.
Bring me the guarded thing
Your heart. Place it here.
Mine has been calling yours
It echoes your name.
I tried reason.
Reason sat beside me
for a while,
then died.
Come heart to heart,
My heart has gone mad for you
quietly, completely.
Some madness breaks the house.
Mine turns the lights on.
The body is arrogant
for something destined
to become earth.
We decorate it.
Feed it.
Photograph it.
Defend its importance.
Then one day
it returns quietly
to the material
beneath our feet.
Dust.
The same dust
kings become.
The same dust
beggars become.
Still, I cannot believe
a good life disappears
so easily.
A kindness moves forward.
A child remembers.
A prayer remains
in someone else’s mouth.
Perhaps the body
returns to earth.
But goodness has always
travelled differently.
Dust takes the hands.
Not everything
they touched.
Some love stories
never become stories.
No anniversary.
No photograph
on a wall.
No legal word.
No room
where everyone agrees
what the two people were.
Still,
something happened.
Two lives touched
and did not return
to their original shape.
Perhaps that is enough.
Not every love
is meant to become possession.
Some are simply encounters.
A person enters,
moves one piece
of furniture inside you,
opens a window,
then leaves.
Years later
you still live differently
because the light
comes in from there.
In the market of the world,
you will see souls weighed like fruit,
priced by beauty,
sold for applause,
wrapped in silk,
and carried away
by hands that never knew their worth.
Sharpen your soul
against the stone of patience.
Wash your pride
in the river of prayer.
Break your fear
like bread before the dawn.
A person is not made valuable by gold,
but by what they refuse
to become.
Then the world will return
with louder offers.
And then,
when nothing earthly
can name your value,
the heavens will lean down.
Not with gold.
Not with thunder.
Not with the language of merchants.
But with a silence
so vast
it will know you completely.
that at last,
what the world could not price,
Allah alone
will buy.
Love.
It is not a chain.
It is a widening.
A room within the chest becomes inhabitable,
and even absence learns to breathe there.
Its joy is never innocent of wound.
It burns, but not to destroy —
it burns so that hidden things
will finally admit their names.
Beauty is no longer a public fact.
It becomes whatever the heart cannot turn away from.
We offer it our little store of hopes, our unfinished selves,
and call that offering enough.
Sometimes it is returned in full.
Sometimes one soul keeps the watch for two.
Still, something in us chooses generosity over pride,
and calls that choice devotion.
Against time, against loss, against the fixed machinery of the world,
love makes its small impossible resistance.
And if it cannot remain forever,
it leaves the days changed after it has gone.
You traded weather for walls.
Edges for upholstery.
A spine for a swivel chair.
It felt smart at first—safe, efficient, adult. Bills on autopay. Calendar obedient. But comfort is a slow tourniquet. It tightens while you smile. It steals blood from the parts that once reached for the storm.
You know this. You can hear the hum. The dead air. The soft kill of easy things.
So break it.
Pick the road with teeth.
Choose the work that argues with you, the kind that makes your lungs file complaints and your hands sign the waiver anyway. Let the wind be your supervisor. Let friction take attendance. Sweat until your excuses dissolve like sugar in heat.
Money? Use it like salt, not syrup.
Praise? Spend it like coin tossed to a wishing well—seen, then gone.
Security? Earn it by wrestling the day to a split-decision.
Stack small, savage wins— the early alarm, the cold water, the extra rep, the honest no. Make repetition your liturgy and pain your currency. You’re not chasing suffering—you’re paying attention. And attention costs.
You were not built for padded rooms. You were built for thresholds—the exact place where fear and duty shake hands and call it faith. Stand there. Every day. Until the man in you thickens back into someone who could carry his own name up a hill.
Choose the hard thing.
Bloom in any weather.
Stay awake or stay asleep—but understand— the bill always comes due.
A girl is born. She now has a “temporary” home; she is expected to go to her “real” home.
Once she goes, that “real” home never feels like home. She wants to go back to her temporary home, but it was always temporary; she can’t stay.
So where is her home? Maybe her grave.
Isn’t this painful?
Or perhaps the pain has evolved into “honor,” meant to satisfy a society’s collective sadism—finding false honor in scapegoating.
This sort of an “honor” is well known in the subcontinent, the rest of the world has its own versions.
The girl—from birth to death, for no reason other than being a girl—remains an eternal refugee.
One candle glows, a year now spun,
May every dawn bless you, little one.
Twelve moons have danced to greet your smile,
May kindness guide each coming mile.
Small hands that grasp tomorrow’s light,
May dreams stay gentle, bold, and bright.
Your first year’s song has just begun,
May love be rhythm, hope the drum.
A single step, a world to roam,
May laughter carve your lifelong home.
A single flame in midnight hue,
May every wish come true for you.
Year one is done, the journey new,
May stardust guide the path you pursue.
Tiny laughs like fountains play,
May love surround you night and day.
From first soft step to open skies,
May wonder light your dreaming eyes.
One dawn behind, a thousand more,
May joy keep knocking at your door.
Petal-small hands greet rising sun,
May grace attend you, little one.
Twelve bright moons have circled fast,
May courage cloak you to the last.
Your story sings its opening part,
May hope reside within your heart.
Birthday bells ring clear and strong,
May kindness keep you all life long.
Candle’s glow and cake’s first slice,
May life unfold in warmth and spice.
You carry a fire the world can’t see,
To become who you’re meant to be.
It flickers most when nights are long,
It feeds on silence, not on any song.
Some chase sparks that fade too fast,
While others build a flame to last.
Take one step true, then take one more,
The path will meet you inside your core.
The loud will boast—the bright will blind,
Yet the depth walks quiet and leaves a sign.
The flame is yours yet don’t be flown—
It’s kindled where truth is sown.
Let others drift and walk away,
Their fires dim along their way.
Don’t look towards the crowds to cheer,
But to become what you hold dear.
So guard the spark and let it grow—
Enough to see the path you know.
There was once a presence—
not quite a girl, not merely a boy,
but a light the soul recognized
before the mind could give it form.
A breath beside your breath.
A knowing.
You did not call it love.
Love was still sleeping in the language.
But the stars leaned closer when they walked beside you,
and silence learned your names.
Time, like wind over sand,
carried both of you into the world’s forgetting.
The path split gently—no storm, no blame—
just the hush of a door that closes
without ever having opened.
Still, they remain—
not in photographs,
not in the echo of old songs—
but in the pauses between thoughts,
in the space where longing becomes a kind of prayer.
Some love does not arrive to stay.
It arrives to awaken.
It leaves no footprints,
yet walks with you for lifetimes.
You may never meet again.
But when dusk drapes the fields in amber hush,
When a voice you never heard calls your name inward.
What you shared was not a chapter—
but the breath before the story began.
In the end, we are all survivors,
Of our own hearts.