By Siddhant Bhedke
It began with a sound I couldn’t wrap my mind around.
Not a voice, not a calling, something between thick fog and glass.
It came only at dusk, when the shadows stretched too long to be trusted and the sky peeled itself open like a secret.
I lay still in the room, pretending not to hear it.
That’s how it gets in, through the parts of you that act.
With a silent vow, thunder rumbles down the sky.
Not sudden, it gathers slowly.
It lingers, spreads across the clouds like a bruise.
Sometimes I wonder if I prefer this darkened atmosphere.
If I were born during a storm,
If the twilight bordered my shadow.
The walls hold their breath as I step outside.
The wet roads turn into glass.
With every step, the mirrors ripple, like the earth shuddering beneath a storm.
Cold drops slide down my skin, quietening me.
The stillness is soothing, but only for a moment.
It’s like reliving a memory while still conscious of its absence in the present, like trying to hear a whisper through a torn blanket.
A breath of nostalgia and then it’s gone.
It smells like wet stone and the pages of old books.
The rain wraps itself around me, around everything, until I'm made of it too.
Like trying to muffle your soul against the wind.
I stand there, calm and at peace, not because I’m safe, but because the noise inside me has somewhere else to go.
The sky doesn’t ask for silence, it demands surrender.
I give it everything I’ve held back in the dry hours.
The storm begins to soften, the grey sky slowly calms, and the last thunder rolls away like an exhale.
As if it’s carrying something I can no longer hold.
Something shaped like memory, or grief, or the echo of a name I’ve stopped saying aloud.
And in the quietness that follows,
It is the silence that listens.
So I let it all go.