Poetry

Hated Friend

It's never the right time
When you knock my door,
I've never sent you an invitation
But still you come and shake me to the core.

I hate you, though I know you so well.
I hate myself when I'm under your spell.

The words you speak are familiar and soft.
You leave me feeling weak and small,
Like nothing is ever going to work at all.

You say you know what you're talking about,
That I should trust you because you're looking out,
For me and for my highest good,
But when have you ever understood?

I wish you wouldn't know where I live,
Wish I'd know how not to give
You all my hopes and dreams and my pain,
So you wouldn't do this to me again and again.

Be someone's the partner of عالم الأرواح
{"The Realm of Souls" or "The World of Spirits."}
So that they found سکون {Peace} with you after marrying you.

Akhter Ansari

You Were Never Mine

I loved you in silence,
I missed you without a sound,
I searched for you in every crowd,
but you were never around.

You became my whole world,
while I was just a name,
I gave you all my heart,
but you never felt the same.

I smiled whenever I saw you,
hiding the pain inside,
you were the dream I wanted,
but the dream I couldn’t make mine.

Maybe I was never meant to have you,
maybe you were just a lesson in disguise,
but I’ll always remember loving you—
even when love brought tears to my eyes.

Travelling from gurgaon to jasola vihar...

On work on sat and I don’t want to spoil my Saturday 🙂

FaceTime with Baba

There should be a screen between us.

My face in one little square.
Yours in another.

Four years of everything that happened in between, somehow reduced to the distance between two faces.

I would look at you first.

Before the words.
Before the catching up.
Before I told you how tall the boys have gotten, how they still carry pieces of you in the things they say.

There are so many ordinary things I never imagined would become things I would grieve.

Your voice lighting up my phone.

Your morning messages.

The little things you insisted on giving us, as though we could never be too old to receive them.

A life can become a collection of missing moments.

The things you should have seen.

The things I should have called you about.

The things I still reach for my phone to tell you, before remembering there is nowhere to send them.

I have changed since you left.

The world kept moving, almost offensively, while some small part of me remained suspended in that week.

And every year, my birthday comes around carrying the same strange contradiction.

A day meant to celebrate that I am here,

arriving so close to the day yours ended.

Four birthdays without your voice.

Four years of learning that grief doesn’t always look like crying.

Sometimes it looks like wanting to tell someone about a demolished lawn.

Sometimes it looks like hearing an old voice note just to borrow a few seconds of the past.

Sometimes it is the sudden ache of realizing there are still so many things you would have loved to know.

I wonder if this is what it means to keep someone.

Not in photographs.

Not in old messages.

But in the reflexes.

In the stories.

In the children who remember.

In the parts of me that still turn toward you.

Today, I am older.

You are still the same age in my memories.

And somewhere between those two truths is the birthday I don’t quite know how to celebrate.

I miss you.

Not only in the moments that hurt.

In the moments I wish you could have seen.

Especially those.

something started deep inside my soul
a quiet hand that shaped a goal
it did not rush or leave me behind
it worked in silence, slow and kind

there are days i feel i might break
when every breath is more than i can take
yet still the hand that started me
keeps shaping what i cannot see
and tells my heart to still believe

what begins will reach its end
this promise time cannot bend
no good work fades or falls apart
it’s written steady on my heart
completion waits where grace began

there is too much noise that pulls the mind
from deeper truth it tries to find
so many voices, rushing fast
that make each moment never last

but thought is not in what is loud
it does not live inside the crowd
it grows where silence learns to stay
and clears the clutter from the way

not every call deserves your ear
not every thought deserves you near
some things will only steal your space
and blur the vision of your place

so choose what matters, calm and true
and let the rest fall far from you