To the one who complied all the answers
to the questions I google insistently:
Thank you.
I wonder
If the work you’ve done was enough—
Contributing to the accumulative sum
of human knowledge, a burden that weighs—
Not for reward, but fulfilling in its own right
To those that read what you’ve written
(a handful among the entire stretch of human life and time:
what grains are to beaches; what stars are to the endless sky)
Will remember you for now, at least.
(To those that give
They pour themselves out from their glass-
heart, thinking it a vast ocean
When it isn’t.)
I believe in cheque and balances
But the red keeps growing and growing
The divide deepens
And guilt—not just mine, but someone else’s—rattles inside
I wonder what stopped me from being you,
From selling my time—
Because we all sell ourselves to something,
Are always slaves to something greater—
But we always have taken life
From each other. Measure for measure
The cup is neither full nor empty
But it is because it has to be
That calling something by one name or another will never capture it whole
And division might be
All that remains.
Sometimes I feel that we’ve lost many things.
It’s no one’s fault
Time past is like a fading film
Easy enough to make out when you know what you’re looking at
And when you don’t, it feels like you’re reading the tea leaves
That can’t help but cling at the bottom.
Hoping it might show some great message or the past or the future,
All while the cup in your hand grows cold.
It’s no one’s fault
Time is a wretched thing, irreversible and perpetual
Dust will collect on even the best kept of things:
You cannot change that the clock will tick
Please stop trying.
These feels like fragmented memories
And in some ways they are,
The blessed comfort in knowing that it’s temporary
And the dread that comes from knowing it won’t last.
Writer – Areeba Zabrina
Editor – Asees Waraich
Artist – Maryam Nawaz
–April 2026–
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