How many doors do you need to lead toward your own heart? How many walks, stumbles, and breakpoints do you need to reach there? The heart is just there on the left of your chest, behind this fragile ribcage, yet it takes decades to reach it. How ironic is that?
You spend years searching for it in other people, in moments, in places that were never meant to hold it. You hand over the keys to its doors to those who don’t know how to use them or where the doors are, and if they find them, they force these doors open with unsteady hands, leaving cracks, leaving ghosts, slamming them back while leaving.
Heart— you think you’ve found it in love, in longing, in the reverbs and rhythms of someone else’s heartbeat against your own. But it slips through your fingers every time—just close enough to believe in, just far enough to lose.
Yet again, you throw yourself into storms, crack your bones against walls that refuse to let you in. You run toward hands that fumble with your existence, break yourself into smaller, more manageable pieces, hoping someone will see through the fractures and call it home. But they never do. They take what they understand and leave the rest in the dark, leaving you to dig through the wreckage alone.
You scream into voids that only echo back your own voice, tear yourself open just to prove you’re still alive, still capable of feeling something—anything.
And then, one day, you stand before it—raw, breathless, stripped of every illusion. Not in someone’s arms, not in borrowed warmth, but in the wreckage of everything you once thought you needed. You touch the walls of your own soul, feel the pulse that never left you, and realize: the journey was never about finding it. It was about tearing down everything that kept you from hearing it.
And when you finally do—tell me, does it sound like a homecoming? Or does it sound like grief?
— Sadia Hakim // Letters Unsent