The Architecture of Absence

                               The Architecture of Absence

I stand in the glare of the shadows,

A ghost in a well-lit room,

Fleeing the eyes of the familiar,

Whose recognition feels like bloom

For the known is a weight I cannot carry,

A ledger of who I used to be,

But the stranger is a sudden rainfall

On the scorched earth of my memory.

With them, I am a blank horizon,

A story that hasn’t been told,

I trade the iron of my history

For a stranger’s fleeting gold.

We build a bridge of borrowed hope,

A fresh and fragile start,

Until the ink begins to settle

And they find the map to my heart.

And so the circle turns again,

The hunter becomes the prey;

Once they know the shape of my silence,

I am forced to walk away.

I am hit at the point of my greatest fracture,

Where the skin is thin and white,

Only to find my voice in the ink—

                  And the courage, once more, to write

                                                         -Pankaj Mala Bhattacharya