Twelve and twelve.
Not equal, not clean, not true,
but close enough for clocks to pretend.
Morning is a door that opens
into the same hallway
we have always been walking down,
carrying our private weather
in our ribs.
Night is the same hallway
with the lights turned low,
as if dimness makes the mind
more honest.
In between:
the kettle's patient hiss,
the thumb's small pilgrimage across glass,
the sink filling and emptying
like a lung practising.
Films cut away from this.
They cut away from the tooth-brush foams,
from the one sock that refuses to appear,
from the pause before replying,
from the half-formed sentence
that never becomes a sentence
because it is swallowed back
to keep the world neat.
But the in between is where I learn my name
without saying it.
It is where my body remembers
what my mouth forgets.
It is where I become fluent
in the quiet grammar of staying.
Somewhere, someone prays
into a pillow,
so softly that even God has to lean in.
Somewhere, someone manifests
with their eyes open
in a bus window's reflection,
saying: Let this be different
like it is a small spell
they can tuck into a pocket.
Somewhere, someone laments
in a kitchen that smells like soap,
hands still wet,
and the wetness is the only witness
that grief has visited.
And I think:
if we could see the true archive
of what we ask for in secret,
it would not look like a cathedral.
It would look like a phone screen
at 2:14 a.m.,
a cursor blinking
like a heartbeat trying to decide
whether it is allowed.
International messages,
sent from beds, bathrooms, break rooms,
sent while waiting for elevators,
sent with the casual ferocity
of wanting to be held
by someone not physically here.
A small device.
A whole ocean of longing.
A whole planet reduced
to the size of a palm
and still too heavy to lift.
This is not about that, I tell myself,
and then I watch my own life
cross the same bright rectangle
again and again,
as if repetition is a kind of devotion.
How much of the day do we actually live?
Not the events, not the headlines,
not the parts that make the synopsis.
I mean the thin places:
the moment before you step outside
when the air on the other side of the door
is still unknown.
The glance at a stranger
who looks like somebody you miss,
and for one second
your whole history stands up.
The instant you hear your name
in a crowd
and you are briefly returned
to your own body.
The way time moves
in slow, monotonous increments,
a weight that does not crush,
a tether that does not loosen.
Bound, yes.
But also held.
The mind's eye makes cities
out of almost.
It builds museums of memory
where every exhibit is labelled
Do not touch, do not reopen.
Instinct sees differently.
Instinct sees a face
and reads the unsaid
like braille.
Instinct hears a laugh
and knows whether it is armour
or arrival.
Instinct carries the oldest map
of our embodiment,
the historical animal
still living inside the modern outfit.
So many hows.
How does the self rehearse itself
in the mundane?
How does boredom become a teacher
instead of a verdict?
How do we measure the hours
spent with our own mind
when nobody is watching
and the world is not demanding
a performance?
The inadvertent preparation.
The unknowing rehearsal.
The quiet craft of becoming
in the spaces that screens frown upon,
in the parts that cameras skip
because nothing is "happening."
But everything is happening.
A surprise message
from someone you have not seen in a long time,
and suddenly the day has a second sun.
Running into a face on the street,
and your future stutters.
Seeing something made
so perfectly that language steps back,
hands raised,
as if to admit defeat.
There are artists walking among us
with whole galaxies in their mouths
and no microphone.
There are poets with grocery lists
who could split your heart open
with one line,
if the world ever asked them to speak.
We pass them daily.
We pass them like streetlights:
useful, unnoticed, faithful.
And I cannot stop thinking:
Who are the people we walk by?
Who are we
to each other
in the blur?
Who am I
when nobody is asking?
How well do we know
what we think we know?
Sometimes I feel my own self
like a room I have lived in for years
but never fully entered,
a door always half-closed
because intimacy is frightening
even when it is with me.
So let this poem be a small key.
Let it be a synecdoche,
one pocket-sized object
that implies the whole life:
a bus ticket,
a half-read text,
a dish still drying,
a coat zipper stuck,
a sigh at the end of a day
that was mostly invisible.
Let it hold the ordinary
until the ordinary admits
it has always been sacred.
Twelve and twelve.
Imperfectly divided.
And in the seam between them,
where the film would cut,
where the screen would hurry,
where the world would label it "nothing,"
I will hopefully learn to stand.
I will hopefully learn to listen.
I will hopefully let the in between
teach me the language of self
again and again
until I stop resenting time
and start recognising it:
not as a cage,
but as the hand
that keeps returning me
to the present,
ever presently tied,
ever presently here.
