The quiet inherits everything words could never name.
This is a revised version of my earlier essay, Islands of Fikr.
Aporia: an expression of real or pretended doubt or uncertainty especially for rhetorical effect. [A logical impasse or contradiction].
Fikr: is an Arabic term meaning contemplation, meditation, and intentional thought, especially about spiritual matters, ethical choices, Quranic verses, or aspects of one’s personal character.
Kipuka: is a real Hawaiian term for vegetation islands that survive lava flows. I'd been haunted by this concept—how certain things endure not through strength but through being overlooked by destruction.
Moni: is a Bengali word meaning “retina.” In literature, it is the door to a person’s soul.
Mon: a Bengali word. Meaning “ heart.”
Reliquary: a container or shrine in which sacred relics are kept.
Let the gaps — and the "you" that goes unnamed — belong to you.
I. The Language of Gaps
Who owns the past—our past?
Does silence weigh on you, too? We never lived easily in the noise of voices. We learned, instead, to listen for what the whispers carried—and sometimes to speak in silence itself. Notice how close the words are: listen and silent hold the very same letters, only rearranged. Meaning works like that. A small turn, and the whole sense shifts. Feelings are slippery things, and words are blunt tools; they can rarely hold a feeling without bruising it. Silence is gentler. It reaches past the edge of what we can say, and there it cradles what words would only crush.
At first we hid in fear; then, slowly, we moved toward each other. We used words—their rules, their rhythms—to build a kind of shelter against the dark of all we didn't know. But think of music. Without the silences between the notes, there would be no music at all; the gap matters as much as the sound. The real world—the one that still holds our past—lives in those gaps. When the noise dies down and memory grows cluttered, it is the quiet that remains, and the quiet inherits everything words could never name. Between the rushed words of a confession lie the gifts the heart never says aloud. That hush is what made us lovers.
II. Remnants of Warmth
Has the longing thinned—that closeness we knew beneath a sky full of stars? Once, the space between our bodies stayed warm. We learned to hold even that space tenderly, but only because we kept choosing each other, again and again. Again and again we found that glow, those moments bright with tears, and asked the same question: would we wait together for all that was yet to be, looking through our Moni—the retina—into the endless depth of the soul?
Close your eyes with me. Be patient. Breathe slowly. Give yourself to Mon—the heart—and reflect. When did we first meet? How many ages have passed since? Can you hear the heartbeat as I move back through memory, searching for answers—or do the winds carry off each wave before it reaches you, leaving you alone on the shore? Know this: we may bathe in love and later dry out of it, yet it stays in the senses long after. Like a wish that never came true, it leaves us both emptied and clear-eyed. There is no sin in returning to such longings, again and again.
III. The Spared Ground
The language of my feelings is a kipuka—a small island of green that the lava spares as it flows. When the rivers of molten rock surge down, they sometimes falter, as if hesitating. In that brief pause, a patch of land survives: living plants, bare and breathing soil, held safe inside a scorched silence. My affections speak from that spared ground, saved by the pause.
My mind, too, was burned—scorched by the grief of regret. You must feel those countless aches when you touch my heart with tenderness. To survive, I anchored myself in waiting—yes, in waiting—and built a kipuka out of the memory of how you loved my limping, weary soul. That was how I carried love back then: by forgetting that no love can grow without the nourishment of truth, and the work of seeking it. Grief, after all, is the midwife of love; it is grief that delivers love into the senses.
IV. Time's Erosion
Entropy does what entropy must: it pulls things apart, and it pulls us apart, too. Time was never our friend. So let us treasure what we have been given now. Let us wrap our arms around each other, curl close in devotion, rest our heads on each other's shoulders, and meet again in the endless field of all we are still becoming. Blessed are those who cross this landscape and reach a place where two hearts beat to one rhythm.
Yesterday feels as far away as last year. Four more seasons will turn, and the patient ones will watch them pass—the sun and the wind, the leaves changing color. Still I sail the tides of time, my eyes fixed on the harbor where my boat once rested, remembering a life already gone. What once felt true no longer does. Even aporia—that openness to seeking while still uncertain—has lost its grace. Time wears at what was, and reshapes the future we try to draw. Its great skill is erosion: drop by drop, it wears away what the heart holds dear.
At twilight I walked along a shore, each breath sharp and thin. My body begged for attention while the waters moved in and out, careless and free—not knowing that it is the Earth's turning, not the sea's own strength, that makes the tides rise and fall. Beneath everything we notice, the truth waits—patient, unmoving. And life goes on.
V. The Witness
A low mound of earth in a meadow murmurs the quiet stories of those who once walked here and have since fallen into Silence. Flesh, bone, and breath—all born of dust and water—have returned to the Earth's womb. Their attachments scattered. The futures they imagined gave way to an unseen current that carried them toward the same inevitable end. We are all travelers bound for one destination. No one stays long on the island called Future; each of us, in time, becomes part of the eternal past.
A few pale slivers of yesterday slip between our fingers and drift away, like moth wings, into an unmarked reliquary. The rest sinks into the dark water of forgetting.
VI. The Keepsake
Later, we—or someone who comes after us—lift the lid of the keepsake box. A flash of glare greets us, then the hush of a cathedral. Walls like glass, mirrors that deceive, a bell that sighs. Light enters, bends, and leaves again in pieces, with no shape and no story. To recover a single memento takes enormous effort, and even then only fragments come back, like rubble. The story we keep is never the one that actually lived—only a mirage, polished and warped by time's hall of mirrors. It is our own private constellation, trembling in the silvered dark.
VII. The Endurance
So who owns the past?
We spend our lives carrying pieces of it: a photograph, a scent, a sentence remembered out of order. We guard these fragments as though they were the whole. Yet the edges soften. The colors fade.
Silence follows behind.
It settles the way moss spreads across a forest floor, the way rust blooms on steel left out in the weather. What was once vivid disappears beneath a patient covering. Sight goes first. Then sound. Then touch.
Until one day there is almost nothing left to hold.
And yet something remains.
Not the event itself.
Not the story we tell about it.
Only the silhouette it left.
Only the hush around what once was.
Perhaps no one owns the past. Perhaps it belongs to that hush—the silence that remains when everything else has been carried away.
Let your ear become part of your reading, as much as your eye. Where a line stops short, where a word stays in its own language, where a question goes unanswered — these are not failures of saying but invitations. The meaning was never only in the words; it waited, all along, in the spaces between them. And those spaces are yours.