The Anatomy of Dawn

Saleha Najeeb

Do not mistake the smile for light.

It is merely how we hide the mourning

of what never had a funeral.

Grief, it does not arrive or leave,

it resides,

like a second pulse beneath the one we claim to feel.

I have carried it, you know

the quiet dissonance of appearing alive

while the soul rehearses its own absence.

There are days I speak,

but every word drips through a sieve of silence,

and you, perhaps,

know this kind of breathing too.

Yet, even stillness grows restless.

Even darkness remembers the shape of dawn.

So I began

not running,

but returning

to the small certainties I once abandoned,

a breath that does not tremble,

a thought that does not ache to end.

Freedom did not come in thunder.

It arrived like forgiveness

a slow unburdening,

a light learning the contours of my name again.

And in that moment, I was not the same.

I was the echo remade into a voice,

the ashes remembering they were once flame.

Now, when I speak,

my words are not a sieve but a garden.

The air hums with what I chose to reclaim.

I have returned

not unscarred,

but luminous from within the wounds.

This, dear reader,

is not survival

it is the anatomy of dawn.