I am not a monument.
My identity is not fixed nor can it be traded,
Not marble-veined certainty ingrained in castles,
Not star-lit venomous ceiling but
standing upright against inherited light,
Not the single spine of a history
that names itself universal but relational,
Within me history dissolves and uprisings rise.
I am undergrowth, I am the root, not the terrace,
I am the underground root that refuses geometry,
Threading sideways through damp soil,
Borrowing breath from leaves
I did not grow,
feeding on what feeds on me.
But, somehow outgrew those who fed on me.
They told me that body is a border—
Skin a nation,
Desire as discipline,
Gender as a corridor with two doors
and a guard at each end who needs an attorney to speak for themselves,
But my body is a crossroad, a trigonometry, a memoir.
It spills past instruction.
It learns new grammar in hindsight,
It learns a new language in solitude,
It speaks a new dialect in turbulent times when resilience becomes armor,
It writes a new history when it devours all ego and surrenders to the unseen.
It can write a new story, rising beyond the purgatory,
The soul will never abandon her alone in the grave of misery.
It rehearses futures in muscle memory
in the quiet conspiracy of cells rewriting their own inventory.
I am not one.
I am a crowd of impulses,
A parliament of unfinished selves
voting in languages, in voices,
that have not yet been standardized.
I am a rolled parchment sealed in secrecy.
My shoulders remember
how to carry other lives.
My lungs negotiate with trees.
My hunger confesses
that survival is always shared.
Call it dependency.
Call it contamination.
Call it the scandal of needing.
Still—
I grow by attachment.
And, outgrow the same attachments.
I am secured by the bonds and then again insecure because of them.
Every word alters my outline, rewrites my plot.
Every encounter redraws the map.
I do not end at my skin;
I extend into voices,
Into histories not mine,
Into desires that split and multiply
like light through broken glass—a prism outshining,
Sometimes dissolving into its own shine,
locked in a shrine for days—my prolonged grievances.
I feel safe there.
I was never the solitary figure
at the center of the frame.
I am the frame dissolving.
A body becoming
in a thousand directions at once—
branching, retracting,
Trying on futures like weather forecasts—
always forthcoming but never finished.
If you ask who I am,
I will answer with a pause……!!!!!!
Not fixed.
Not final.
Not unitary.
Only this:
I am happening.
I am becoming,
I am an incessant process in progression,
A being, a self under construction.
A nomadic subject, I have been memorizing the nomadic journey for a while!
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame: 10.27 pm, 13.02.26