✮⋆˙Shabnam ౨ৎ

If I go, the roads may erase me. If I stay, these hills might.

These hills have raised me badly, tightly, they taught me how to echo, not how to arrive.

And what if the world outside these hills asks me to become someone louder, sharper, less tender than I know how to be?

The hills are closing in again. I can feel them breathing behind the houses, beyond the farms, beyond my parents calling me home, beyond your wind-blown silhouette beneath the yellow corner-shop light.

I fear staying. I fear becoming another window that never opens.

But leaving frightens me too.

What if no place ever holds me this gently again? What if comfort only comes once?

What if I spend years missing these bent roads, these rain-heavy evenings, your voice caught in all of them?

Even the thought of leaving you feels unnatural, like tearing a page out carefully and still ruining the book.

And what if I leave only to discover the world is just as cruel beyond the hills?

And what if one day I miss this place, and what we had here so violently that every thing out there feels borrowed?

But I must choose. That, we both must do.

-Me

I hope my love feels like the sunlight spilling through your mother's scarves lace. A warmth that doesn't nag to stay. But lingers anyway.

Whom you want to Chase, Whom you wish to reach again & again, for nothing else feels quite the same.

I hope it feels like the song of the rain in quite nights. Like a sense of something you can't quite name, which may not be quite right.

And even if I were boring, and strange, if my words fell crooked. If my hands always fidgeted,

I hope you'll still find something kind in the way I stay.

I hope my Love feels like a home where no one screams, like the tea still warm despite all the storm.

And when I do fade; may my love linger in the way you gaze.

-Shabnam

Almost love, almost freedom, almost home, almost a place my heart could roam.

O Lord, if I can never have a thing in whole, then take away the wanting of it. Let me not hunger for what shatters the moment it’s held.

Teach my hands to loosen gently, to love the half, the echo, the passing scent of mercy.

Do not give me what You will take. Do not let my heart rehearse forever what was only meant to visit.

If you, dear reader, love me still, then love me small: just enough to forget I was ever meant to want.

-Me (Shabnam)

To leave, I must be received by the Eternal Home, but even the stars refuse to look twice at me— for they know the scent of my sins.

one of them, my favourite sin, the one that hums my ruin sweetly.

and how could I walk toward mercy, when I still kneel at its name?

how could I beg for wings, when its voice anchors me to dusk?

I wish I were deaf— never heard the sin sing for me. I wish I were blind— never saw its hunger mirror mine.

then leaving would've been easy. then loss would've been clean.

but I live between two refusals— unclaimed by earth, unworthy of and unwanted by the sky, and still, I love my ruin as if it were holy.

-Me (Shabnam)

So let me braid your voice through mine, like prayer through breath, like salt through brine; let me stay until the sea parts, until forgetting softly lives.

I’d listen again and again, to the song you sang— not for me, and perhaps that is the death of me, the greatest sin I carry.

I’d read the same words, the same texts, a thousand times, flickering hope for that, only to bury them the next moment reminded of my place.

and still the echo lingers, like a prayer I’m not meant to pray, yet cannot stop whispering anyway.

And I sing to none the knowledge that it was never supposed to be.

If I never belonged— would never belong; then why make me not nothing either— always the space between what could’ve been and what still aches to be.

forever the third thing; not the bride, nor the bridesmaid, just the ghost of both, haunting the vows that were never mine to speak.

I’ve tried to name it— love, longing, sin— but it keeps slipping through the teeth of meaning, becoming something else, something quieter, and more cruel.

I walk between those meanings; I build a life around them that ends the same each day.

first came the fear of being mirrored, then the dread of the ‘ilm that came with him, and then finally the horror of the thought of ever letting go— for to lose what’s never spoken is the deepest of sorrows I know.

And still, I stay— half in prayer, half in fear, that no one will ever feel it that way.

and what if comes a day, it leaves, and takes the part of me that finally found sense?

I dare not ask my Lord to take it away, for what would I be without the ache? a sin that talks too softly to condemn.

so I do not ask You to erase it. I only ask that it hurts kindly, and leaves enough light to still find You in the dark.

-me

there is a wind that hums; but is it for me?

it moves through prayer, through the sea’s still skin, a lullaby too familiar to grieve.

the stars repeat what I’ve denied: my hands still reach what’s been denied.

I tell my lord, I’ve learned to wait, but bargain softly with my fate.

they say all hearts return to what’s written, but I’ve read the lines too many times; and have repeated them again and again— what if I’m told to stop so?

you walk in dreams that aren’t mine, and still the air tastes of surrender. I tell myself it’s mercy— this distance, this dimming— but mercy, too, can wound like love.

to loosen love feels close to death, to free his name would steal my breath. I promise silence, then I break— a jealous prayer I can’t unmake.

for every breath I let Him keep, returns to beg, returns to weep.

if light was meant to live in me, then why this hush, this vacancy? how could I guide another soul when half of mine is still un-whole?

and when the angels whisper you home, may they carry my name.

if not for me, then let him be a verse I guard eternally; my sin, my sign, my symmetry, my test, my tender blasphemy.

and if I’m wrong, o lord, forgive: teach me the way the unloved live; let longing end where You decree, and let his light fall short of me.

-Me

They threw stars on my back, branding me in burned blame, and even the golden silence—

silence that I misinterpret; silence of your secrets I swore to hold—

slipped from beneath my hands, falling like tears on nights the sky refuses to move, when the clouds ache out your scent, and whisper your name from under these godforsaken eyelids.

Your name tortures me with the trust it carries. I keep hearing it— in every prayer, every word I told her to save her heart, with the love that was yours to give— that you still give.

And so, I break it— the palanquin of your faith, and my greatest sin— into three halves,

and wish on one:

if he returns to the Lord, let his first sin be looking at me too long, his repentance— looking at her longer, and may that repentance be mine as well.

As I stare on the other, wishing:

drown the part of me that still calls his truth mine.

And I wish on the last piece for another wish, but the Lord isn’t just for me— so I pray instead:

if he dreams of me, let the dream fade before morning; let my name fall silent before his heart can answer it.

-Me

when you let the silences be — silences still, just humming through them with a hmm, like the world didn’t end, only stared back at itself to hear me smile.

but did I tell you that I’ve been broken before by you too?

and so it’s not.

then, you didn’t make me weep, but now that you’re right here —

building me again, with half the heart you brought back with you, as if the rest was never mine to hold —

so now you burn me with pins you forgot were there.

you think I love a girl — maybe I do — but mostly she’s the shadow of you. she lives in the lines I cross out in fear, between what I mean and what I let you hear.

one fall away from giving up slowly, but then you’ll be right there, reminding me of our story.

and I don’t wanna be in love with another, even in some other life. if it must be someone else, o lord,

just tear me apart this time. let me not return to you, and not to the same wound, or that same prayer.

for I have called his silence mercy, and that, too, must be a sin you allowed me to name as love.

for what is love, but the wounding words I say to keep you away.

-Me

I want him.

Did he offer that glimpse to say that I was consuming him, or to remind me of how I was made — solely — to consume myself?

Was that his way of saying

I’m eating him from within, that my love crawls drolly slow beneath his skin, seeps into his lungs, as a fever he can’t name, a wound he prays to keep?

Or did he mean I am the kind who swallows herself whole— the kind who burns by the light she’ll never hold? Does he believe I sip ruin like mercy, and call it devotion? (He wouldn’t be wrong.)

He said, “That’s you.” And I wondered— is that a curse, or a prayer being answered?

Do I haunt him yet heal him by leaving him torn? Or am I the tear itself— and the one tearing too?

O God, if I have sinned in loving him, let it be my last and purest sin. Let it be the only wrong I repent from truly.

For I have known no heaven— save Yours— purer than his silence after calling out my name.

-By me

This yearning is no mere poem anymore, it has drained all the red from me— leaving behind hollow, brittle, and bare bones to fend for themselves, as though they don't feed on the red of your lips.

I rage at the walls, at the sky, at the way your shadow sweeps across everything I cannot touch.

I tremble at the thought of your words, curling my fingers around air where you should have been.

I whisper curses to the waiting owls, to the streetlamps, to the emptiness between your laugh and my lungs. And still—still, I ache like a song with too many choruses, so loud it hurts, yet no listener dares to end it.

For in it lies the sigil of your existence, written in ink, sung by the sun.

I am a tide pulled toward the vastness of wanting; of wanting something that will never be mine.

-By me

আমি আসছি, আমি আসছি, আমি আসছি তোমারও পাখায় ভাসানো এই পথে।

জোৎস্নার আলোয়, শীতল শিশির ভেজা দেশে, তোমার ডাক শুনে উঠি; ভোরের শঙ্খে।

বলে মোহিনী, যার রাঙা হাত, তা চড়ুইয়ের বুক-ঝরা, শ্বাসরুদ্ধ লাল।

আমি আসছি, আমি আসছি, আমি আসছি তোমারও পাখায় ভাসানো এই পথে।

⋆˚꩜｡𐔌՞. .՞𐦯⋆. 𐙚 ˚ 𓏲ꪆ ⋆𐙚 ₊ ° ⊹ ♡

I will come, I will come, I will come along this path you’ve floated by on your wings.

In the moonlight, in the land drenched with cool dew, I rise at your call— like the conch at dawn.

Says the enchantress, whose hands are stained, red as the sparrow’s trembling, caught breath.

I will come, I will come, I will come along this path you’ve floated upon your wings.

-By me (Shabnam)