Writers Jam

home was once a lantern its light spilling across my skin, a soft geography of belonging. now it is only smoke and i chase it with empty hands.

my mother was the first poem I ever read her voice the ink her arms the margins that held me my father was the silence between verses, the heavy pause that made sense of words. my sister, she was laughter bottled in glass, fragile, glowing, and i drank it until i forgot thirst.

but when i left, the glass shattered. the poem lost its pages. the lantern drowned in the dark.

the hostel walls are not walls, they are ribs of an unfamiliar beast and i sleep inside its hollow body. at night, when i close my eyes, the fan becomes a dying planet, spinning above me, while i am the astronaut who can never return to earth.

the human i love is a wound stitched with roses. every glance of his pulls me deeper into an exile I both fear and adore. his presence is an ocean that erases my footprints and yet, he is the only map that still burns in my hands.

i think of home and it becomes a locked garden. i see the table where we once sat, the chairs are vines, the bread is dust, the walls bloom with absence. i press my face against the glass but the garden does not open.

to leave is to turn into smoke. to step away once is to become untouchable a ghost passing through the same rooms without being seen by the mirrors.

and love does not save me - it only makes the wound holy. i carry them all - mother, father, sister, bestfriend and the boy whose gaze is both anchor and noose like constellations stitched inside my chest. but constellations cannot be entered, only looked at from a distance.

that is the punishment of time: it teaches you that doors are one-way, that beds remember absence more than presence, that laughter fades faster than silence.

home was once my heartbeat. now it is a coffin i decorate with metaphors, a shrine i kneel before, a place where even love cannot resurrect me.

and so i walk forward, with smoke for lungs, with memory for blood, with love that burns but does not guide.

because once you leave you are the broken lantern, the unread poem, the astronaut without gravity.

you can visit the ruins, kiss the stones, weep into the dust. but you can never go home.