Cold

Shahnaz Islam
It’s not the winter whispering at my window,
But the endless nights where sleep feels like death—
A quiet, frozen corpse.

You chose to hurt me,
And I chose to stay silent, to stay small.
You broke my heart into too many pieces,
Shards scattering,
Too jagged to ever fit back together.

You walked away,
And I stayed behind,
Rooted in a sorrow I couldn’t shake.

One unremarkable evening, you asked me,
Why do you act like a stranger?
But my silence roared louder than words:
We have always been strangers.