Shayan Afzal

There are days when the words never arrive, when the page feels like a room I have entered too early, the lights still off, the air still cold, and I stand there wondering why I came at all. I tell myself that writing should be simple, that it should flow if it is real, but the truth is that nothing real has ever come without resistance. Still, I keep returning to it, not because I’m certain it will lead anywhere, but because not writing feels like a small betrayal of something I can’t fully name, a quiet promise made long ago in some forgotten part of myself. And whether anyone ever cares for these sentences or whether they remain unread; what matters is that for a brief moment, while shaping a thought into language, I feel aligned with my own life, as if the act itself is the only place where I stop pretending and actually tell the truth.