Hushed Voices

The last year left me pretty lost on almost every aspect of life I went through. Career? I don’t know anymore. Love? Not sure. Hobbies? It’s been too long to even be a little bit good at it. Family? Friends? I have them but... I don’t know. I felt stranded even when all of it was my choice. One moment it felt like it was everything I wanted, and in a second, everything faded away like I had none of it, to begin with.  Getting through it was one hell of a ride, and I can’t say I’m all the way through it yet. But, I think, now, I do see a gleaming light at the end of the tunnel. With an aching chest,  trembling knees, and labored breaths, I’m dragging my feet forward. None of this sounds like victory. Maybe that’s exactly what defeat would sound like. But, I can’t choose either because it’s me I’ve been battling with. All I know is that I can’t stop, except to catch my breath.  However grueling it is, now that I look back, I realize it was all necessary. I needed to come to...

  To see someone pouring their heart and mind and soul into the spaces between the letters, To the ones handcrafting souvenirs, and knitting warm blankets for cold souls telling them, Yes, I understand. To entangle those feelings and their depths with the shapes of these letters as if using the veins in their body to hold them together, To give these words life with blood, sweat, and tears To give them power over people’s minds and hearts, and yet not overpower them, To put these letters at ease, though they’re weighed down by the responsibility/duty to carry all of these,  To freeze a moment, a tear or the curve of a smile, the sparkle in someone’s eyes or the emotion in one’s heart, into a train of letters, To let them flow like the air and take distinct shapes like water in a vessel, To carefully piece together this plethora of letters, into poetry Or to weave them into one fabric of a beautiful prose, To leave hints of oneself intertwined between the knots that hold the wo...

 I've always been excited to celebrate new years. Somehow it has always carried a sense of excitement and ecstasy with it.  It always made me want to celebrate, to shout and jump out of joy as I yell out happy new year. Maybe the reason is that I've always wanted to be the first one to wish everyone that I care for. Now that I think back, I've never been able to figure out the reason behind the excitement.   I'm not here to tell you how excited I am for another new year.  To be honest,  I think screaming out happy new year,  is pretty overrated,  because it has been a little exhausting with everything that went on in the last 2 years. I'm terrified of stepping into another year of adulting,  with none of you beside me.  I'm not saying it was completely bad and I've lost hope,  no,  it's quite the opposite.  It's just that,  this year,  I choose to cherish what I have,  every second that I breathe, because al...

 " True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; "  ~ Edgar Allan Poe. Nervous?  Me?  Of course, I was! Sitting in my room, all by myself, and the light was so dim. All through this time,  every word I read reverberated in my ears,  and though were very simple words,  it made me so nervous.  I still convinced myself to keep reading ahead.  Why?  Well,  only because stopping feels harder than keeping at it.  Some weird obsession with the eye of an old man, I thought to myself.  Did it have some mystic powers?  How can it make someone's blood run cold?  Well,  this didn't frighten me at all but there was something else that did.  It was the eye of the one that was obsessed with the eye of the old man.   Of everything else till now,  this made me freeze. " Every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept." It might look like an ordinary thing,  but t...

When there are a hundred other ways to pass time,  a thousand other ways to be productive, and countless other talents that turn heads, do you wonder why I still choose to write? It's because I fell in love with writing. Others might write for a lot of reasons.  They write to earn,  to showcase their forte,  to inform, to manipulate, to bring about some change, to attract attention, or to earn a reputation.  There might be a million other reasons why someone would want to write.   For the people who know me,  you might think you know why I write. It's because I am good at writing,  I am good at the language, and because I simply want to keep doing something that I'm good at.  But that's not it.  I've to tell you,  it's completely the opposite.  I feel I'm not good enough, I feel it's not something that catches the eye or captures the heart.  I feel it'll just be left behind like it's just another pebble on the beach, ...

There, behind the curtains, I wait, in angelic white. I’ve seen you a million times before but waiting to see you now feels different. The wait somehow seems longer. My heart thumps out of my chest and screams into my ears that it can’t wait any longer. I know you will be there waiting for me and in that moment when my eyes will meet yours as I see you there, I wonder if it will feel the same way it did till now. I can hear the clock ticking and each passing second makes me fall deeper in love with you.  In the distance, I hear the sound of the organ as the processional starts and when I picture you walking down the aisle from the other side, it makes me want to come in there, running to you. Don’t worry, I won’t. Just a little more of this waiting and then I wouldn’t need to wait anymore. Thinking about you makes me weak in my knees and I nervously clench at my corsage. The bridesmaids start walking and as I walk in behind them, I see all the people who are standing in there for u...