On Borrowed Time

We are living

in the small margin

at the edge of a page

someone else has already written.

The clock knows this.

It clears its throat every evening.

You sit across from me

as if nothing is temporary —

elbow on table,

tea cooling between us,

your voice moving through the room

like a quiet river

that has never needed a map.

We speak about ordinary things —

a book,

a stray line of music,

the strange weather of March…

but beneath the conversation

another language is forming.

It says:

remember this.

Remember the way laughter

arrives before either of us is ready.

Remember how silence

does not frighten us.

There is a long corridor

between two doors

neither of us will open.

Sometimes I think

friendship is simply love

that learned restraint.

Sometimes I think

it is the purest shape of it.

Soon you will leave…

the sentence hangs in the air

like a suitcase already packed.

I practice not asking

how far the distance will be.

Instead

I collect small things.

The tilt of your head

when you disagree.

The patient way

you let my unfinished thoughts

find their feet.

Memory is a careful archivist.

It keeps

the quiet details.

Later

when the room is emptied of you,

I will unfold these moments

like letters written in disappearing ink.

And perhaps that is what we are:

two people

who met briefly

in the wide geography of living,

sat together

in the borrowed hour,

and built

without saying so,

a country made entirely

of remembering.

Fortress Doctrine

I remember the first fracture –

how quietly it announced itself,

like a hairline crack in porcelain

that only I could hear widening.

Since then, I have learnt masonry.

I lay my silences like bricks,

mortar them with rehearsed indifference,

measure each kindness that approaches

against the blueprint of past ruin.

Nothing here enters unexamined.

There is a wall now:

not the crude kind built in panic,

but a deliberate architecture:

a defence I designed

when intense tenderness turned traitor,

angles calculated,

windows bricked before they could become doors.

I have made myself a country under siege,
 for once, the world was precise enough to alter me.

Even tenderness arrives

like a trespasser at dusk,

and I, vigilant,

raise another layer of stone,

another quiet refusal.

It is not that I do not remember warmth.

It is that I remember it too well -­­­

how it softened the ground beneath me,

how I sank.

So, I harden:

a method, a habit, a shield —

choosing distance as a kind of mercy

I grant myself before anyone else can withdraw it.

Inside, the heart continues its small,

insistent knocking,

a bird sealed in a cathedral of concret

but I have trained my ears

to mistake it for wind.

This is how I survive:

by becoming impenetrable,

by calling it protection, not fear,

by building and rebuilding

until even I cannot find the door.

And sometimes,

in the dead hour before morning,

I press my palms to the inner wall

and wonder—

if I am keeping the world out,

or saving myself

from the ruin of letting it in again.