When there's a lull in the air, I get the feeling that I've scraped the bottom of my fleshy insides. I've decided to stop looking at how sweat curls over and around my skin, I think this is all there is. But then I look at my neck and I'm no longer a person. My mother tells me, over and over again, that my posture is because I never sit right. I am too uncomfortable in my own skin. I am not even a person when I talk because I break things when I speak. Sometimes, through my words, I try to be like you who is not phased by this. A person, I could carve my face to resemble you and use the light to hide the parts that don't need seeing. But at night I forget and my shape resembles a child. You know how to love and keep your back straight—I think all of me tends to break every now and then.

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IS & WAS

But I think the wind will come and it will carry some more of my meaninglessness away and into the sky that now looks a little pink and there they might even grow and start their own lives. I think I will become the sky, and the concrete, and then my father will enter my room to tell me something but I won't hear him. We have the same ears, you see. I will wait for him to leave before I tell him whatever I want to, I will wait for him to stop looking at me because I cannot learn how his love works any more than I can learn how my own does. What do I do with these? Someone in the streets keeps telling me to carry an umbrella, he spends his evenings bathing in sun and dust—and he allows himself to smile between every word and every beam of light. And he allows his silence to grow to hold on to him, at times he looks like the sun. Where will you go if it rains? My mouth wants to open but

I think I know the answer.

Raian Abedin is a poet, a student of Biochemistry, and a contributor for The Daily Star.