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A Shelf of Things I Never Said

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Maimoona Abidi

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“Do you still feel it in some happy elsewhere, a quieter version of us sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor, arguing over groceries, your hand reaching for mine between apples and oat-milk. Sometimes, I imagine running into you as a stranger. Your eyes flicker with almost-recognition, like they remember the weight of my name in the dark. We smile, polite. You walk away. I fall in. I don’t know if the abyss was always meant to feel like home. But I keep its door half open just in case you ever want to return as someone new. Or worse as someone real.”

LovePoetryLossGriefHealingSadRomanticLongingKissHearbreak
Book:A Shelf of Things I Never Said
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“The garden stretches out before us, every leaf a promise, every flower a quiet rebellion. I remember when we planted the first seed, its smallness fragile like hope. Now, the tomatoes hang heavy, bright with the fullness of summer, and I wonder if we’re not so different from them. How many seasons of patience did we need. How many days did we water the soil with regret until love finally bloomed.”

LovePoetryLossGriefHealingSadRomanticLongingKissHearbreak
Book:A Shelf of Things I Never Said
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“Cemeteries stutter like broken radios static and memory, all at once. Not quiet. Never quiet. Just my father’s voice trapped between stations, trying to reach me across years he never learned how to carry. The way he would clear his throat before telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear. My mother didn’t cry at burials. She folded her grief into the corners of her saree, tucked them between recipe books, let the scent of cardamom mourn in her place. Grief is not an echo. It’s the bruise on a peach. It’s turmeric beneath the nails. It’s calling out names in a cemetery and flinching when no one turns. Some days I mistake sidewalks for gravestones. Some days I pour tea for the silence at the table. Some days I mistake dust for the breath of memory. Some days I say “I miss you” to the crack in the wall near the kitchen sink, to the kind of quiet that doesn’t leave. But grief never finishes its tea it just stains the cup and walks away barefoot.”

LovePoetryLossGriefHealingSadRomanticLongingKissHearbreak
Book:A Shelf of Things I Never Said
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“I saw something ancient, because I knew I was not seeing something beautiful, but beauty itself, like the holy thought of God. I was discovering that perfection, even glimpsing it once, and once only, was something light and lovely. I looked at that form from the distance, but I felt that I had no hold on that image, as happens when you are on in years and you seem to glimpse clear signs on a parchment, but you know that the moment you move closer they will blur, and you will never be able to read the secret that the page was promising you - or, as in dreams, when something you desire appears to you, you reach out, move your fingers in the void, and grasp nothing.”

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Book:Baudolino
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