for the things i never ask.- Ra’ahe Khayat

i would’ve rather asked you
how many names you’ve scribbled
on the back of your hands
with needles,
and how many of them you’ve stricken out
when the bus stopped
in a screech,
and two footsteps always faltered
on the sidewalks
in a slow contemplation
of death.

i would’ve rather asked you
how many times you’ve stabbed your thighs
with razor blades
that sank perpendicularly
to your veins,
when the wrinkles on their wrists
folded into themselves,
like curtains closing
over their heart chambers.

i would’ve rather asked you
the number of ways
you’ve learned to sing her poem completely,
without ever remembering the stanza
that left her lips
in those seven mute seconds
that somehow got trapped between
your window and her door,
when she had been
choking herself on all those lifeless little sentences
that had wrapped themselves
around her voicebox
like a noose that tightened
every time your lungs skipped a breath.

i could’ve asked you to describe
every single scar on your skin
in microscopic detail-
but sometimes,
your quiet echoes vividly
when my heart falls silent
under your palm.

sometimes,
i live when you don’t speak.

---

“I’m an autumn leaf, fluttering with loneliness on a naked branch.. where I observe the world, like a specter. It’s all fleeting moments, entwined with cold mornings fading into frosted evenings. Never still, yet never moving.”

I am Ra’ahe Khayat, and let me make you fall into the rabbit hole breathing in my mind at Fallen Alone