My parents' window kept me awake at night,
long after I had stopped sleeping in my mother's bed,
long after I had learned to sleep on my own.

Buckets of water I pour on my head; my vision gets blurry.
"The blurrier, the merrier", my mother said.

You mustn't look to live.
Live on your own; put your heart where you are.
Plant a tree to feed off of it, not for it to devour your heart.

And where do I start?
On my part, my rebellion fed my tree,
for them to chop it down and put down concrete and flee.

The Daab Gach blocking my parents' window looked like a ghost to me,
for me to fear it, for me to love it, and for me to fall in love with it.
The Daab Gach blocking my parents' window blocked half of the world from me,
how dare it not let me be awakened by the sun?

The Daab Gach planted by my grandma no longer blocks the sun,
a building does it better anyway.

Of ghosts I feared as a child and of friends that kept me alive in my teens,
why must nothing remain as I walk past time and time again?

Araf Mustafa walks around the streets of Dhaka and writes poems about open brick buildings.