Jiya

i will tell you how we met

and for one terrible second

A long one.

An unbearable one.

For insanity.

It is a strange thing, waiting for her when we are to be the best of friends.

When the time finally comes, I only hope I get to know her half as well as she already knows my mind,

my heart,

People speak about justice like it is objective, measurable, blind almost

as though courts can govern honesty better than human beings can.

But no system on earth has ever been powerful enough to force belief.

Because to the people who need you to be a liar, you always will be one.

No evidence will soften them.

No confession will satisfy them.

No amount of grief spilling out of your mouth will ever look enough to those who have already decided what you are.

And I think that is the real tragedy of being human,

that your truth can exist in its full, unbearable entirety,

stitched to my bones,

taught my shape,

grew around me like it knew i would need it.

and still

you speak

and your words burrow.

not loud.

not even cruel enough to bleed.

but just enough

to sit under the surface

and itch.

and itch.

and itch.

until i forget what comfort feels like.

until i start dreaming that

maybe relief looks like tearing myself open

just to reach it.

It's that they're almost the same thing.

A moth is not the opposite of a butterfly any more than dusk is the opposite of dawn. They're cut from the same shape. The same wings. The same fragile body. At a glance they belong to each other.

And yet they spend their lives chasing different lights.

A butterfly opens itself to the sun. A moth mistakes fire for it.

There's something devastating about that uk the idea that two things can begin with so much in common and still become entirely different creatures. That resemblance is not destiny. That sharing a shape does not mean sharing a path.

Maybe that's why the metaphor works because sometimes people are like that too.

You meet someone and they feel familiar in a way that frightens you. They carry your mannerisms, your fears, your hungers. They feel like a version of yourself that wandered off years ago.

And yet where you softened, they hardened. Where you stayed, they left. Where you learned caution, they learned desire.

They stand so close to the person you could have been that it becomes difficult to tell where one life ends and the other begins.

Not opposites.

Hunger humiliates

It keeps you alive just enough to know what you missed

Mediocrity is not survival

That love is a god to the unloved, and peace, a temple for the war torn.

Perhaps divinity isn't power- it's absence.