Skin & Wound
By Zainab Hassan
Here’s a temple: I am your skin, you are an open wound &
anything out there is love. I am trying to remember the dream
in which you told me there’s more to my life than my best-
friend’s face but I disagreed. I have been trying to go back
home for the past two weeks—why did you already lose
the keys? Listen, I want to confess my love to you for the last
time but all I can ask is if there was ever a better ending for us
in another lifetime. You don’t get it. Do you?
Two people in love are nothing but carcasses of each-other,
& your love reminds me of
the house I grew up in—loud but deafening. Warm but
burning.
Listen, I cannot be what you want me to be. I am just flesh and
bones wrapped in skin waiting to be immortalised by your
touch. I cannot be anything more.
I hate to break this to you but
a broken wing is not a bird & not every love is meant to last
longer than the bombs going off in the courtyard of our house.
So, put your hands on your ears & sing because
somewhere in this world two bodies are still falling in love &
making up for the ending we had hoped to have.
Author’s Note
I am a writer from a small town called Okara in Pakistan, and my work is deeply rooted in the place that shaped me. Besides studying biotechnology and physics at Forman Christian College in Lahore, I write about grief, loss, love, and anything that feels like home. My writing is both refuge and reckoning; a way to hold onto what matters and make sense of the world around me.