Night is not simply an empty solitude, left in the wake of the day’s relentless efforts.
Night is not just fatigue, or the sinking into the pillow of “another day has passed.”
Night is a deep pit, as vast as the space left by someone who should be here, but is not.
And now you try—filling it with the smoke rings of your cigarette, with the bitter, untimely sips of coffee, with candles weeping behind the windowpane, with losing yourself in the waves of a thousand-times-read novel, with scrolling through someone’s photos on social media, with tracing the innocent letters of a short message on your old phone.
It doesn’t work.
“For ever, I’m leaving. Goodbye.”
And night began precisely after that message; a sorrowful four-word sentence, each word blackening a quarter of my sky forever.
You might ask: “Wasn’t that night over? Didn’t morning come?”
But it is unclear whether that night ever ended. Is it still night? Is it always night?
The foolish insistence on the wretched cliché, “Every dark night ends with a morning,” is a worn-out plastic seal, fit to stamp anything—an ice cream tub, or a faded pink bra hanging on the laundry line—without ever signifying the end of a tormenting state or the beginning of a better one.
These foolish assurances, these plastic seals, serve only desperate poets, rummaging through the ashes of grief in search of bright words.
Every comforting phrase deceives, claiming that something—someday, somewhere—will finally end.
No.
Nothing, ever, anywhere, truly ends.
It is you
who ends.
Word by word,
you vanish…
Nasim Lotfi
Nasim Lotfi – Poet & Writer 