Brick by brick I have built myself,
Picked from the abyss—
dust still clinging to my ribs,
History still trembling in my wrists.
Inconveniently and incomprehensibly irreplaceable—I am.
I am therefore, I think.
No architect carved this heart.
No tender hand measured the fractures.
I gathered ruins in silence,
Stacked them against the grind,
Called it a wrestle.
In the wrestling of hearts, I lost parts of me.
Parts of my life are insignificant matters.
What mattered once doesn’t matter anymore.
They said collapse is feminine—
Soft, inevitable, vocal.
But I learned the discourse of debris.
I learned how to make a spine
out of broken evenings.
If you sit all alone on that prayer mat,
You begin to swallow your own endurance.
Salt becomes memory.
Tears become testimony.
Hunger for a connection becomes a private revolution or perhaps,
A silent call for evolution.
Transforming the previous self that used to destruct every connection.
You are a havoc,
A galvanized fire,
A patrol that ignites and burns the city in the dark night, just like a missile.
Then, from rubble you scrub a dynamite only to explode into many pieces.
The pieces of yourself that you once lent to others and then struggle to put it all together—
As if an infinity some war of longing and not belonging,
Belonging but not attaching,
Attaching but not scaffolding,
Scaffolding but not suffocating,
Handcuffed but not a prisoner,
A lover but not a memorandum.
There were nights
When the ceiling leaned too close and showed stars.
They screamed your lost distant ones name in loud whispers.
When loneliness pressed its thumb
into the pulse of my throat.
And, I gulped my own blood in the teeth with soaked tears,
I lost my voice in shredded fears.
From the fear of abandonment to loneliness –
A new fear unlocked-
Fear of attachment that binds but obstructs.
Still—
I did not beg for rescue.
Independence is not loud.
It is the quiet refusal
to dissolve in someone else’s shadow.
It is choosing not to explain
why your silence is sacred.
Yes, I have been abyss.
Yes, I have been rubble.
But I have also been mason,
and a portal.
And the shaking hand
that refuses to drop the last stone-
From paleolithic age my tomb had Its own tongue.
Do not mistake my restraint for emptiness.
I am layered—
earthquake and tsunami all at once.
I am protective of my calm
because storms have memorized my name,
And, mountains have echoed my grief,
Sliver line clouds have caressed my wound
with a healing balm—
An ointment called inner strength sometimes resilience we call.
Brick by brick I have built myself.
If you knock—
know that this door was carved
from what tried to bury me.
And, here I still stand upright close.
Yeah, nostalgia sometimes hits hard, but there’s no reverting back.
Time lapse doesn’t go backwards.
It moves forward with memories holding tight.
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame: 5.13 am, Tagar, MIST