" I " not " WE "

‘I’ not ‘We’

By: Ammun Rehman

There are many of us indeed

Our hair as dark as ebony, our skin not fair as snow

Our lips hold smiles that glimmer and fade

As fast as lives that come and go

Our eyes hold brown like the earth that carries us

The same eyes that stay blind to darkness

However it is those who are the blindest that see the most darkness

They see us as rainbows; we see ourselves as such too

Rare, admired but easily forgotten

Replaced by the sun when the rain is gone

We share our colors but they pick apart their favorite

Our souls come alive with music

Our heart like strings they bedevil, leaving them weary and worn

Only few can play a melody with strings so broken and torn

We find beauty in scars but not our own

We say you are beautiful but not ourselves

We give you hope where we lost ours

We sing for you hoping the melody resonates with your soul

Where our own is tuneless and resides without words

Existing as empty space and silence

We fear silence as much as noise, because in the noise we hear others

In silence we hear ourselves

Indecisive about which is more threatening

We set others on adventures but fear being left behind and forgotten

We find ourselves in others, as side characters for their quests

Where they vanquish dragons and demons

Yet our own quests begin and end in front of mirrors that show the inside rather than out

We fear many things,

We fear one day our songs will become old

Our strings will bend and snap

What if we no longer have a melody left to play?

What if the mirror peers so deep that it drowns and suffocates?

We fear our true selves will be buried beneath clouds and lose itself in dreams and fantasies

Our souls made from stars that crumbled to sand

Which once shone brightly but now sparkle as dust

We talk about stars because they make us feel safe and loved,

We speak of them because they twinkle at us, telling us it’s okay

We stare as they refuse to judge us no matter what we are or why

They are small but many

They return each night when the world is at its darkest

We admire them because they admire us back

We spoke of dreams and fantasies,

Scenarios that make us Kings and crowned

Where reality is slanted and tipped

Shattering paradigms and piecing together paradoxes that define us

Tracing eternal universes on maps to see ourselves unravel

Engraving our names in constellations so we remember ourselves when we look up

We don’t have and inner landscape,

No

We have a universe so infinitely immeasurable it defies words and leaves them bare

Now, we have told you each truth and not one lie

The only difference being we are not ‘We’ we are ‘I’