The house still breathes in jasmine,
walls steeped in monsoon whispers,
floor cool beneath bare feet,
where time lingers in the scent of sandalwood and warmth.

She sits, wrapped in the hush of afternoon,
silver hair catching sunlit threads,
fingers tracing stories into the skin of ripe mangoes,
soft hums curling through the air like incense.

The wind moves through neem leaves,
a song only she understands,
and in the hush between moments,
I swear the earth leans in to listen.

Before her hunger stirs,
she feeds the strays—
a quiet ritual of compassion,
her heart full, as if the world is fed.

Her voice is a river—deep, steady, endless,
carrying echoes of the past,
names of those who no longer walk these halls,
but whose laughter still clings to the doorframes.

And when she calls my name,
it is not just sound but something more—
a place, a belonging,
a love that lingers, like jasmine at dusk.

Time falters—
splintered light pressed through rusted blinds—
a room forgetting itself.

His hands—
once steady
now vessels for something hollow,
something slipping through.

"I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night."

Her name
a bird trapped in his throat
fluttering against the ribs
half-formed—
half-vanished—

How cruel—
to carry the ache
and not the shadow
that cast it.

Somewhere—
the past is still happening
small hands folding into larger ones,
the hush of stories whispered into the hollow of sleep—
a red kite tangled in the branches—
the scent of almonds and grass.

But memory is a delicate violence
it gives and it takes
it leaves only what can be carried
yellow feathers,
paper trees,
the ghost of a name
pressed into the soft cage of breath.

He smiles—
without knowing why,
without knowing who

the echo—
soft as breath against glass,
fading before it touches

And somewhere—
she is still holding his hand,
leading him home

a yellow feather
caught in the hush of his breath—
weightless—
circling—
never falling.

I have taken the flowers.
Ripped them from the light,
peeled their bright faces back
like something skinned alive.

They did not scream.
They only folded—
like lungs emptied of air,
like mouths pried open
with nothing left to say.

O, love is a quiet violence.
A hand that plucks.
A hand that presses.
A weight that does not crush—
only keeps.

Here, a lilac curls,
like a severed breath.
Here, a daisy chokes on dust.
Here, a rose—veins milk-white,
mouth frozen in a paper-thin hush—
a relic of something that once burned.

And tell me, do they still remember?
The wind that kissed them last,
the trembling hands that held too tight,
or only the silence left behind?

I listen—
ear to time’s brittle ribs,
to the breath of pressed petals,
to the ruin love leaves in its wake.

And somewhere,
in the marrow of silence,
I swear I hear them—

whisper back.

She was a girl with oceans inside her,
waves made of dreams too fragile to hold.
But the world is indifferent —
it pulls, it drowns, it takes,
leaving salt in the wounds it never cared to see.
Her tides fought back,
rising, crashing,
begging to be enough,
until exhaustion felt like peace.
Now she floats,
not sinking,
not swimming,
just there.

I stood in the hallway,
the familiar scent of jasmine hanging heavy—
my mother’s perfume.

I called her name,
but it wasn’t the voice of my mother
that answered.

It was mine—
but younger.

I turned the corner,
and there she was—
sitting at the kitchen table,
but her eyes…
they weren’t hers anymore.

"I’ve waited for you,"
she whispered,
and the room went cold.

I reached for her,
but my fingers sank into her skin—
soft, pliable,
like wax—
too easy.

And I realized too late—
she wasn’t waiting for me.
She was pulling me in.

Then I felt it—
a slow, unbearable pressure in my chest.
I couldn’t breathe.

"You’ll never leave me again."

It’s the tranquility
I longed to be drowned in,
Even if I suffocate,
I’d know it leapt from what I’d become—
A monster to myself.

Even if I drown in desolation,
There’s still life in the stillness,
The quiet joy in my plea,
A glimpse of what I could have been,
If only I had not been my own monster.

But even monsters can unlearn,
Can find grace in their scars,
So I'll rise from the silence,
With whispers of who I’ll become.

Act I: The Universe Breathes, and I Am an Afterthought

I arrived late to existence,
billions of years after the stars had their golden age.
Missed the Big Bang,
missed the Renaissance,
missed the time when love letters were written on paper,
instead of reducing feelings to keystrokes.

They handed me a body,
a mind that questions too much,
and a world obsessed with carving meaning out of chaos—
as if Sisyphus hadn’t already proven
we’re all just rolling boulders uphill,
pretending not to notice the futility.

Act II: The Weight of Knowing, the Lightness of Forgetting

Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
I read that at 3 a.m. and felt personally attacked.
Descartes told me, “I think, therefore I am,”
but some days, I think too much and forget how to be.

History is a carousel of déjà vu,
spinning the same tragedies on repeat.
Empires fall, currencies crash,
trends resurrect themselves like poorly buried ghosts.
The Greeks feared hubris,
the Romans feared the barbarians,
I fear how meaning crumbles when no one is left to remember.

Act III: Beyond Meaning, Beyond Regret

Maybe Dante was right—
hell isn’t fire, it’s bureaucracy.
Maybe we’re just modern Stoics in overpriced hoodies,
romanticizing the art of being okay with things we can’t change.

Maybe meaning isn’t found in grand gestures,
but in the quiet absurdity of it all—
in watching the sun rise like it’s not exhausted,
in laughing at a joke older than Shakespeare,
in knowing that despite wars, collapses, heartbreaks, and lost civilizations—
someone, somewhere, still bakes bread from scratch,
still hums a song they don’t remember the name of,
still chooses to keep going.

Final Scene: To Exist Is to Hesitate, and Yet—

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
I’m still figuring out my why.
But in the meantime,
I’ll sip my coffee, watch the world spin,
and pretend I was always meant to be here.

cat — or the echo
of some old philosopher
dreaming through small lungs.

Veiled in nocturnal opulence, she sways—
a specter of dusk wreathed in abyssal silk,
her beauty a chiaroscuro of ruin and divinity,
where the fabric of night quivers against her skin,
a tremor between creation and collapse.

Her lips, smeared with the ink of oblivion,
part like a fault line spilling whispers of dissolution,
drinking the hush of a waning moon,
where silver tongues unravel dirges in the wind.
Her gaze—twin cataclysms of obsidian and opal—
devours the marrow of time,
hollowing the cosmos with the weight of her quiet ruin.

She unfurls like velvet hemorrhaging silence,
the air trembling with the ghosts of forgotten incantations,
stitched into the sinew of midnight’s elegy,
where time convulses, folding into the iridescent wreckage
of her shadow-drenched grace.

He arrived ,
fire-tongued
wings lacquered in sunlight,
like a breath the garden forgot to exhale
green burning against green.

I was a child
with small hands that believed
giving was enough
to make something stay.

I fed him,
chilies plucked from the crooked vines
my father planted
bright little tongues,
burning red,
barely ripened,
all I had.

He bit me,
a clean puncture,
as if to say:

Love is no debt I owe you.

Blood welled up,
startling, hot,
the first truth nature ever gave me.

I stood there crying
while he finished the offering,
then flew away,
lighter.

What child understands hunger
until it pierces skin?

The next day,
I was waiting,
small hands trembling again,
opening as if the bite
had never happened.

A grind—bones against gravel,
Flesh pulled thin by rusted teeth.
A wail, swallowed by the wind,
Spat back hollow, broken.

The carousel, once a carnival of hope,
Rots in a barren field.
Its beasts—hulking shadows,
Eyes wide, frozen in fear
Of what never came.

Time loops—endless, merciless—
A cruel ring of blood and ash,
Twisting upon itself,
Never ending, never beginning,
Only echoing empty promises.

The wind howls with ghosts of lost ambition,
Claws dragging across splintered wood,
Brushing rusted metal—
Each touch a whisper
Of what could have been, but never was.

Dreams died here.
No one mourned.
They only rotted,
Sinking into the earth,
Leaving behind echoes
No one dares to hear.

And still, the carousel spins—
Not because it wants to,
But because it's too broken to stop.

Gold seeps like marrow,
stars bruise against the void.
"Light is starving," he mutters,
"even the sun feasts on its own fire."

Frost exhales—
a slow, deliberate frostbite.
"Light is a path,"he murmurs,
"but men mistake fire for direction—"
"they burn chasing it."

Emily lingers, a moth in lace,
wings dusted in ruin.
"And yet, all paths end the same—"
"a mouthful of quiet, a bed of hush."

Vincent laughs—ochre-stained teeth,
lips split with fevered art.
"Silence is blue," he whispers,
"a drowning, gasping blue—"
"the color of voices suffocated in paint."

Ruskin presses a palm to the glass,
watching years soften like ink in water.
"No, silence is the color of old hills—"
"of books breathing dust in rooms left untouched."

Emily smirks.
"Ah, but death is an artist too—"
"it sketches men into whispers, steals them like dust in light."

Vincent exhales, trembling.
"Then let it take me in color."
"Let me vanish in thick strokes—"
"golden, breathless, eternal."

Frost watches shadows stretch long.
"Some men vanish in quieter ways—"
"no fire, no frenzy—just the hush of winter."

Ruskin traces ivy creeping over forgotten doors.
"Some men vanish like abandoned houses—"
"sinking soft into time’s arms."

Emily tilts her head, voice a half-buried secret.
"Perhaps eternity is not silence—"
"but the echo of a name no one dares to speak."

The air cleaves, static-thick—
a fuselage of sound lacerates the hush,
metal entrails rupturing sky,
the aftershock draping itself
over a man who once outran
a city’s collapse.

His ribs still bear the weight
of the bomb that did not **** him.
His breath—
a fissure splintering
through the wet hush of memory.
The war remembers him
before he remembers the war.

Elsewhere, a child flinches
at the snarl of firecrackers,
cinders curling their tongues through the air.
The smell of burning skin never quite leaves—
it lingers in the architecture of memory,
in the way hands recoil from heat
long after scars have paled.

And then, there is me—

Not sirens.
Not gunfire.
Not calamity’s echo.

A clock does not tick.
It gnaws—
a scalpel carving time into my marrow,
chewing at the walls of existence.
Its rhythm—
an elegy for the unstirred,
a pulse of urgency
lodged between my teeth.

The city writhes in metallic discord—
horns braying like gutted creatures,
steel nerves shrieking beneath
the weight of their own impatience.
Traffic thickens into a thrumming fever,
pressing against the skull,
a needling static unraveling thought.

Crowds surge, faceless, voiceless—
speech dissolving into the blur of motion,
gestures hollowing into gestures,
the world slipping into a reel
that plays too fast,
then too slow,
then too fast again.

But the loudest sound,
the one that cleaves me in half,
is the one that does not exist—

Silence.

Where thought unspools unchecked,
where absence carries its own gravity.
A hush so vast
it stretches skin thin over bone,
so boundless
it becomes deafening.

I thought life was an equation,
one that could only exist in absolutes—
black against white,
sharp lines, clear edges.
But then, you blurred the borders,
redefined what it meant to be whole.

And I realized that in the spaces between,
where nothing is clear,
the most profound truths linger—
not in certainty,
but in the quiet chaos of change,
where we are found, whole in our imperfection.

Beneath the skin of the world,
there are names no lips have touched in centuries.
They linger in the mouths of ghosts,
curl in the spaces between prayers.
What do we call the ones
who have outlived even memory?
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps that is the final death.

Summer belonged to the mangoes first—
golden, sun-fat, splitting at the seams,
dripping down wrists, pooling in the hollows
of our hands— a crime scene of sweetness.

We ate without caution,
let the sugar gloss our lips,
let the gold run—drip, smear,
something like hunger, something like greed.

Your mother hated the mess.
Scrubbed your fingers raw,
tut-tutted about sticky floors,
the bad habits ripening in you.

But mine—mine only laughed,
pressed my palms between hers,
kissed the sugared wounds like an oath,
said, let some things be wild, love.

That summer, we outran the heat,
split the dusk with our honey-lunged laughter,
left fingerprints gilded in the sun.

And when I told my grandfather I liked mangoes,
he arrived the next morning with a whole harvest,
grinning like he had outwitted the season itself.

My mother still laughs,
but I scrub my hands clean now.

Some things stain.
Some things don’t.

Mornings licked amber—
wet, bright—
papaya pulp split in the grass,
rain still steaming off rooftops.

they came—
sway-backed, jewel-eyed—
weaving cobalt ribbons through the cricket fields,
feathers slick as oil spills.

I waited—
barefoot, rice pinched in small fingers—
not offering—inviting.

they took—
beaks sharp,
eyes glinting like they carried whole summers behind them—
but they never left.

even when the rains came—
hard and urgent—
they stayed, hips swaying under silver sheets,
tails dragging through warm mud.

I thought they danced for me—
as if the whole monsoon belonged only to the girl watching— silent, secret-spined—
hair curling at the nape—
too small to touch,
too quiet to call them by name—
but they saw me.

I know they did.

they crowned me in silence—
Princess of Puddles,
Keeper of Small Hungers.

somewhere between the serpent hunts,
the rain-slick pirouettes—
I learned how beauty moves—
how it takes without asking,
how it lives without needing to be seen.

they were never mine—
but I belonged to them—
to the fevered mornings,
to the blue-green shimmer folded beneath heavy air,
to the secret language only wild things speak—

something wordless—
something that never leaves you.

Stone lion mourns deep,
etched in grief, yet standing proud,
bravery carved wide.
A lion falls, yet duty stays,
Carved in stone, his honor sways.
For king and cause, they stood, they died,
Their silent valor, petrified.

I wandered through a house of glass—
Where echoes lined the walls—
And every sigh was catalogued
In airless, silent halls—

A ribbon—folded into dusk—
A letter—laced with dust—
A ring—unfastened from a hand—
A vow—reduced to rust—

The floorboards hummed of footsteps hushed—
Of names—no lips would call—
And shadows, draped in tattered lace,
Danced soundless through the hall—

I placed my heart upon a shelf—
Beside a wilted rose—
And watched the evening take its leave—
Where love—unburied—goes.

They raised a cathedral for hesitation’s specters,
a mausoleum where half-lived fates fester beneath glass,
each relic a carcass of fractured intent.

Here, a breath lingers in crystal—
a stillborn confession, lips parted, words calcified mid-escape.
Beside it, a rusted key entombed in velvet,
a relic of an unbreached threshold,
a house collapsing under the silence of absent footsteps.

In the west wing, violins lie gutted,
their spines snapped mid-requiem,
melodies strangled before they ever touched air.
Across the hall, a wedding gown—pristine, untouched,
its silk sodden with the ghost of a name
almost taken, then discarded
like an unclaimed prophecy.

The curator drifts through corridors of regret,
brushing dust from the obituaries of roads never walked,
straightening the portraits of lovers who almost stayed,
of letters that withered in trembling hands,
then were entombed in the graveyard of never sent.
The air itself swells with the dirges of forsaken dreams,
whispering in the tongue of the undone,
suffocating in the thick rot of inertia.

And at the hall’s end—a mirror.
No plaque, no inscription, no mercy.
Just your own reflection staring back,
begging you to walk out before you, too,
become part of the collection.

Will you leave, or will you be archived next?

He smiled like it was the last time,
And I knew it, though I didn’t ask why—
The air between us shifted,
Unspoken, like a secret the sky keeps,
Just for a moment, before it fades into silence.

His words lingered like a whisper caught in the wind,
Unspoken yet understood.
We were two fragments of something infinite,
Touching only briefly before slipping through the cracks of what could have been,
But in that brief pause, everything felt complete.

The storm and the calm
In the depths of your mind, emotions collide,
A sea of thoughts, nowhere to hide.
You feel with a fire, burning so bright,
A heart full of dreams that take flight at night.

You walk through the world like a poem in the rain,
With a soul that’s both gentle and full of pain.
Lost in the moments that only you see,
A dreamer, a thinker, a heart full of plea.

You stare at the stars with questions untold,
Hoping one day, your story unfolds.
A smile hides the storm you can't control,
But still, you move forward, heart and soul.

You hold on to hope, though it feels like a chase,
In a world that moves fast, you set your own pace.
With every glance, with every thought,
You write a new chapter, lessons hard-fought.

You are the storm and the calm in between,
A story unwritten, yet clearly seen.
And though you may wonder where this road bends,
Remember, it’s you who gets to write the end.

Fruits unmoored from origin,
spectral and pendulous,
suspended in the hush of an unclaimed offering.
Ambrosial weight presses against an open palm,
a phantom indulgence—
unheld, untouched, unfed.

Nectar unravels—
though no flesh was sundered,
no blade traced its weeping hymn,
no tongue ever nursed its ruin.

Bare feet kissing marble’s chill,
fingertips tracing teak and dusk,
air thick as mulled velvet—
honeyed, heavy, slow.

She moves where silence frays,
light spills like sugared wine,
breath lingers like an unshed sigh—
never still, never caught.

Fluorescence hiccups across her skin,
pavement inhales her weight,
a flicker, a glitch, a sliver of absence—
half-held, half-gone.

She dances where gravity forgets,
shadows soften like overripe fruit,
laughter drips slow as melting wax—
feral, fleeting, free.

She is not waiting to be found—
she is, and that is enough.