I melt.
Slowly,
Like an ancient metal remembering its origin,
Learning to unlearn the shape it was forced into.
Transmutation is not alchemy of gold.
It is the alchemy of grief.
It is when the psyche burns,
But does not scream,
Because it already knows
that flames speak a language older than pain.
Some nights,
My mind is a crucible.
Old identities blister and peel,
Traumas crack like molten glass beneath the flame.
I become liquid.
Viscous,
Shapeless,
Dangerously honest.
And in that molten moment,
I witness myself
without armour,
without myth,
without the smokescreen of survival.
Psychological transmutation is violent.
yet soft——
A paradox etched into the nervous system.
It is the undoing of old selves
that died quietly inside me,
Long before I gave them funerals.
It is the slow resurrection
of the woman I was meant to be
before the world taught me to shrink.
Every wound becomes a new atom.
Every heartbreak- a cosmic shift.
Every abandoned version of me
carves a new geometry in my consciousness.
I emerge,
not purified nor petrified…
but reforged.
Sharper in intuition,
Deeper in empathy,
Quieter in ego,
Louder in truth.
I rise like a reconfigured constellation,
Scattered maybe, but luminescent—–
Rewired with the stubborn current of survival.
This is my alchemy.
My psychological metamorphosis.
My soul’s rebellion against every force
that tried to keep me small unevolved.
I am still melting.
Still forming,
Still glowing ——
An unfinished miracle trying to read between the oracles,
Learning her final shape through fire.
I descend first.
Transmutation does not begin in light…
It begins in the places I never dare to look.
The psyche opens like a wound
I thought I had healed.
And suddenly I am bleeding memories…
I swore I had buried it alive.
There is no gold here.
Only rust,
Only residue,
Only the stench of old selves
rotting beneath my ribcage like abandoned versions of me…
Still waiting to be claimed.
Some nights,
I feel my mind cracking—
A slow, whispering fracture
like bones remembering accidents
that were never spoken of.
I do not glow;
I smolder.
A dull, feral red
that belongs to women
Who has learned survival
through silent disintegration.
Transmutation is not rebirth……..
It is a funeral
Where I am both corpse and mourner.
I watch my innocence drift like burnt paper,
Blackening the ceiling of my consciousness,
With the smoke of everything I outlived.
The metamorphosis is chemical.
Magical….
but also cruel—-
Each trauma dissolves into acid that eats
through my defenses with surgical patience.
I feel myself liquefy.
Not gracefully,
But like metal tortured into revealing its truest shape.
I become molten honesty—
Dangerous to hold, fatal to dismiss.
In this darkness,
I confront the creatures I birthed
in moments of weakness…
Fear with its fractured voice,
Loneliness with its claws,
Rage with its quiet, an orphaned howl.
They gather around me…
As if I were their mother,
As if they want to be transmuted too.
So I burn with them.
I let the shadows eat my old skin…
Layer by trembling layer……
Until I feel a new pulse,
Emerge from beneath the ash.
What rises is not purified—-
Purity was never my destiny.
What rises is sharp,
Feral and ethereal…
Enchanted with its own darkness.
A woman forged in psychological fire,
Stitched together with every nightmare
She refused to drown.
This is my transmutation—-
Not divine,
Not holy,
But undeniably real: the alchemy of shadows
learning to glow without permission.
Transmutation begins
where the universe hides its bruises.
In the black
behind the black,
In the silence no telescope dares to measure,
In the gravitational ache that pulls me inward
as if my soul remembers being a collapsed star.
I am a cosmic distortion.
A woman shaped by supernova wounds,
Stitched from the debris
of unfinished lifetimes.
Every trauma is a dying star.
Every heartbreak…a dark blackhole,
where light enters but never returns the same.
The psyche bends here.
Warped by memories
that behave like unstable particles…
Appearing and disappearing
with cruel quantum precision.
My grief floats in a vacuum.
Untethered,
Weightless yet unbearable,
Orbiting the center of a singularity
named me
.
Transmutation is indeed a dangerous cosmic violence.
An implosion of identities
I outgrew of….
But still I mourn.
I collapse.
Quietly and catastrophically,
Into my own event horizon…
The point of no return
where I meet all versions of myself
that died quietly in past timelines.
They whisper:
“You were always meant to be
a metaphysical rupture.”
And so I am with excitement…..
A constellation rewritten,
A nebula of old selves turned to smoke,
A galaxy learning to exist after burning everything
That made it more human?
I rise not as light
but as dark matter—-
Invisible,
Immeasurable,
Yet, the force that holds my entire universe together.
This is my cosmic transmutation…
Alchemy done in the language of stars,
Rebirth carved in interstellar darkness.
Midnight builds a cathedral in my chest.
The walls drip with old memories.
Waxen,
Blood-warm,
Still whispering the names of the ghosts
I tried to abandon.
Transmutation here is gothic …..
Stitched with grief,
Laced with nightmares
that wander barefoot
through the corridors of my mind.
I am a haunted architecture
of past selves that I need to integrate,
Each one hanging from the ceiling
like forgotten portraits
whose eyes follow me
Even when I refuse to turn.
My psyche is a crypt.
My childhood, a locked coffin;
My growth, the breaking of skeletons
that once protected me
But now rattle
with every inhalation.
A black flame burns in my ribcage…
Ritualistic,
Cold,
Bold and ancient.
It melts the parts of me that no longer belong.
Dripping onto the stone floor
where my shadows kneel like loyal worshippers.
Transmutation is not healing…
It is an exorcism.
It is the slow peeling of masks
grown from survival,
The tearing of statures that held me sane,
The gentle, horrifying realization
that some parts of me
only bloom in darkness.
I evolve like a forbidden hymn,
Low, trembling,
Dangerous if sung aloud.
A woman reborn through gothic alchemy,
Veiled in the lingering scent
of her own destruction.
I step out of the ruin
not as a purified saint,
but as something
far more frightening:
A self-aware darkness.
A sentient shadow.
A soul sharpened by the night
that tried to devour her.
This is my transmutation…
Painful,
Algorithmic and gothic,
Grave-born—dark,
Beautiful in its ruin.
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy
Time Frame: 1 am, Tagar, MIST, Mirpur Cantonment.