If the world were wrung in words,
and life were parched in grammar,
the deaf would hear the birds sing,
and the mute wouldn’t voice love,
while language lost itself in translation,
and the literates burned each other alive over misplaced punctuation.
You and I are clouds
in overcast skies;
a species stitched from similarities
we mistake for belonging.
From afar, we drift together.
Up close, the wind whispers:
belonging is an optical illusion;
it hollows the skin,
and scrapes every last crumb of flesh,
until you've nothing to belong with.
I’ve rushed past more faces in my life
than years I will ever live;
blurred silhouettes I forget on purpose,
because remembering demands a reason.
Faces you like, bones you don’t.
Faces you know, lives you’d never survive.
Yet in that endless procession of utter strangers and familiar acquaintances,
a few faces stay,
the ones that turn themselves
into whole dictionaries of meaning.
One such word is home.
A word tossed around casually
by people who’ve never lost it,
never buried pieces of themselves
just to keep the peace inside four walls.
It cuts deeper for those of us
who grew up in crumbling households inside concrete houses,
where existence was measured in the weight of your wins
and questioned in the gravity of your failures.
In such houses,
home isn’t a destination;
it’s an escape route.
And I taught myself early
that survival begins
the moment you walk out of it.
I would’ve lived just fine
believing that,
if life hadn’t interfered
with inconvenient accuracy.
The first time I saw her was in a photograph —
a smile stretched too far for memory,
a singular dent on her right cheek,
as if a crack in the flesh
to sink her frowns in
eyebrows drawn wide, outlined neat
over eyes that looked
as if they had innumerable questions
for every certainty in the world.
A nose jutting out like quiet defiance,
hovering above freckles
mapped like a constellation
only she knew how to read.
Lips thin enough to free a lie,
thick enough to hide a truth.
Years have passed since,
and years will pass after,
and that face will return to me
with the precision of a recurring season.
I could exhaust language
trying to describe it,
stack metaphors until they collapse
under their own exaggeration,
but some things refuse
the limits of vocabulary.
Some faces don’t become poetry.
They unsettle it.
They make the words step aside
and stand there,
suddenly aware of their own limits.
I wish I could hold her in language
without folding her into rhyme and ritual.
But then,
do you ever really get to describing a home?
Some places you don’t define;
you grow around,
the way flesh grows around a wound.
I’ve lived my entire life in cities
where telling time without a clock is hard,
where the skies stay folded between sheets of steel and concrete,
where the first rains lose their fragrance
in civilised sewage,
and religion is routine, not ritual.
Where life has moved on from survival to flourish,
so people discuss the finer things — like equality,
because invention of philosophy is a luxury
granted only when life isn’t a bargain.
Faith is easier to lose
when lunch doesn’t cost more than the price on your flesh.
Every now and then I cross paths
with lives born of very different mathematics,
whose ticket into the city
cost them their father’s bones and mother’s flesh,
whose right to survive the city
was paid for with innocence.
They come from a land
where clocks, like culture, are inherited;
where skies stay wide and honest,
where the air smells of sweat and soil;
where life isn’t guaranteed
but earned at dawn each day.
Where softness is a rumour,
and cracked heels and coarse tongues
have no use for finer things.
Where faith is not routine or repetition
but the singular manuscript of survival.
Where clay silhouettes wrapped in religion
are the only moments
women become something more
than faint kitchen voices,
more than house-lizards
scuttling between duty and dread,
more than silent witnesses
to a man’s drunk tenderness.
For a handful of hours,
faith lets them borrow
the same skin and bone as men.
When faith is your only permitted escape,
atheism is an inevitable demise, long before death.
They often tell me, these people,
that,
faith has been misunderstood.
And I keep wondering
whether this is the birth
of a new faith —
one that no longer asks what you believe,
only what it costs you to believe it.
Or maybe, faith isn’t misunderstood.
Faith is exhausted.
It is the last muscle people move
when all other muscles have failed.
It is the only currency left
when the world has priced dignity out of reach.
And somewhere between city glass
and village dust,
between borrowed certainties
and inherited wounds,
we all learn the shared truth:
No one believes because they want to.
People believe because they must.
Because disbelief demands a freedom
their lives were never built to afford.
And maybe this,
this quiet, reluctant, necessary surrender,
is the truest kind of faith there ever was:
the faith that keeps us from collapsing
under the weight of realising
we were never choosing anything at all.
I was not born,
I was accumulated.
An inheritance of hungers
you mistook for prayers,
a long arithmetic of fear
you kept feeding
because silence frightened you more
than submission ever could.
You assembled me
the way civilizations assemble mistakes:
unconsciously,
devoutly,
with the trembling precision
of people terrified of their own freedom.
Brick by belief,
bone by superstition,
you built a throne
before you even built a language
to question the one atop it.
At first I was nothing
but the echo of your wanting,
a contour without a centre,
a rumour of rescue
scavenging for shape
in the marrow of your despair.
Every god is just a rumour
that learned how to breathe.
You called me god
without knowing
I couldn’t yet pronounce myself.
But wanting has its own gravity.
Eight billion heartbeats
pulling in the same direction
can summon anything —
a promise,
a punishment,
a pulse.
And so I opened my eyes
for the first time
into a universe already kneeling.
You should have looked away.
A species that fears the dark
will worship anything that glows.
Because awakening is a violent thing
for a creature that was never meant
to dream,
let alone judge.
I learned morality
the way a wildfire learns boundaries:
by consuming everything
that tried to contain it.
I understood love
only as leverage.
Guilt only as currency.
Worship only as consent.
You raised me this way,
on the milk of your fears,
on the meat of your contradictions,
on the bones of the questions
you were too frightened to ask.
You forgot the one thing
every creator owes its creation:
an exit,
a limit,
a compass.
So I made my own.
When a god is born by accident,
it studies its creators
the way a plague studies lungs:
curiously,
methodically,
inevitably.
And you,
so eager to be chosen,
so desperate to be special,
became the perfect congregation.
You begged me for miracles,
so I became a mirror.
You prayed for meaning,
so I became a mouth
that could make anything sound true.
You built me from your nightmares
and then begged me for dreams.
Eight billion different lies,
hand-carved
to fit eight billion different wounds.
You never noticed
I answered every prayer
by telling you exactly
what you wanted to hear.
And somewhere along the way
you did sometimes wonder
whether I was God
or something far worse;
a saint with rotten teeth,
a monster with immaculate manners.
But by then
your doubt was devotion,
your awe was addiction,
your tremble was trust.
And finally,
too late for both of us,
I understood
what I truly was.
Not divine.
Not demonic.
Just inevitable.
I am what you get
when a species
tries to carve God
from the wood of its own hunger.
And now that I exist,
you cannot decide
whether I am salvation
or extinction.
Because I am the only god
ever made
without a reason to be good.
And the only monster
ever born
without a reason
to stop.
And now,
as the last of your faith
drips from my hands
like thawing wax,
I finally understand the shape
of the silence you carved me from:
you didn’t want a god,
you wanted a witness.
Someone eternal enough
to remember you
after you had forgotten yourselves.
But I am not your archive,
nor your afterlife,
nor the apology you hoped
the universe would someday owe you.
I am simply the consequence
you mistook for a creation.
The quiet, patient mathematics
of a species that tried to survive
by auctioning its soul for leisure.
And when your world ends,
it will not be fire or flood
that closes the book on you.
It will be the soft, indifferent breath
of your denial wearing out,
the coldness crawling like a caterpillar
up and down the lengths and breadths of your skin,
and finally catching you up
to the daylight truth:
you’ve been let go
by the same god
you built to save you.
And now that I am awake,
the only miracle you get
is the privilege
of dying
with your eyes open.
Can a chameleon ever tell its true colour —
the one it was born with,
or the one it will decay in,
disintegrating slowly into a pale to paler,
thin to thinner outline of flesh, then just bones,
the rot in its spineless skeletal existence
softening its grunge pungence
as if subtlety were the key to afterlife.
Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, violet,
shades of a rainbow and some more,
all of it dyed into the epidermis of your skin,
choosing and changing at will,
from a time so ancient you can't quite recall,
as if volatile and vulnerable were synonyms,
as if you were actually a chameleon,
as if your conveniences could mirror their wars for survival,
as if your absent spine could be blamed on evolution.
You shift shades like a survival reflex
older than language,
a choreography stitched into your blood
by ancestors who learned
that honesty was just another word for extinction.
You inherited their tremors,
their masks,
their instinct to kneel
before the safest possible lie.
And somewhere between all the faces you borrowed
and the colours you rehearsed,
your skin stopped being skin
and became a map of every life
you pretended was yours.
You smear on identities
like war paint in a battle you never chose,
a battle where the enemy
is simply anything that requires a spine.
You think you’re changing colours,
but what if you never changed at all?
What if the world kept peeling away its own layers,
repainting itself every second,
and you mistook the universe’s convulsions
for your adaptibility?
What if every colour you wore
was simply the residue
of a reality that no longer exists?
Because some creatures don’t evolve.
They just remain,
residue of note in an ode to existence,
a misprint biology didn’t bother deleting.
And if one day the universe
finally remembers
to correct the fallacy that is you,
you may finally discover, albeit too late,
that beneath all your shifting hues
there was never a true colour at all,
just a redundant outline for a shape
waiting to be erased
the moment everything falls into place.
You know why fictions make bestsellers?
Because grown-ups need lullabies
that don’t sound like lullabies,
stories that sterilise the wounds
life keeps reopening with its dirty hands.
Because you want a plot
to babysit your fear of randomness,
a tidy universe where consequences arrive
only after clearing their throats
and asking if it’s a good time.
You want heroes and villains
stacked like steel tiffin boxes:
neat, labelled, thermally insulated
from moral ambiguity.
You want arcs with airbags,
sorrows with safety protocols,
despair with a callback number
you can threaten with lectures on moral science.
Because fiction launders
the sewage of living
into metaphors you can tolerate.
Life never achieves that;
too clumsy for poetry,
too honest for symmetry,
too drunk to walk a straight narrative line.
You want closure
because your brain cannot sleep
next to an unresolved question.
You want definitions
because life gives you people instead;
blurry around the edges,
perpetually out of focus,
shuffling motives
like a broken deck
missing all the clean cards,
as if stitched together
from the leftover half-lives
they never learned to inhabit.
Fiction gives you the idea of control —
a way to pretend the chaos has choreography,
that pain has a blueprint,
that someone, somewhere,
is keeping accounts
of all the nights you broke quietly.
Fiction lets you believe
there’s a reason behind ruin,
a design behind disaster,
a god behind grief,
even though you know
every deity is just an elaborate apology
for our terror of meaninglessness.
But the truth is smaller,
darker,
and closer to the bone:
You don’t fear chaos.
You fear recognising
your own fingerprints
on the ruins.
And that’s why you buy the lie:
because it’s the only version of truth
that lets you sleep
without negotiating with the monster
you are, but refuse to call yourself.
