Some lurk in the shadows,

Some hide among the humans,

For we could not tell them apart —

Which one is us?

And which is the parting half.

As I look around,

People mould,

They change. They morph —

An evil wide grin is all I see.

Their claws piercing the souls

Of one another.

Some crushed beneath the heap,

The meagre at the top,

Gorging on souls.

But I see something,

A void beneath them.

Not a shred of soul

What do they Claw?

I wonder.

I saw myself,

In a mirror beside me,

It casts a wide, evil grin

A MONSTER WITHIN ME —

Clawing my unfettered soul,

Claiming its human doll…

Monsters among us… was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From shameless wander to shamelessly hide, shamelessly dream and shamelessly hope, everything had one thing in common. That’s shame, and that’s a shame! For expecting humans not to be shameful, but it’s a shame to expect them to be shameful accordingly. Expecting it to be worn like a coat during winters and removed during summers. To wear it during an event and to remove it in the car as per convenience.

When it’s inside a human, it’s not waterproof, making it low quality, less durable, yet affordable. Can be rented, faked and embodied. It wears away like the dirt accumulated in my nails.

There are circumstances where one is trapped in a situation and has no other option but to leave it at home and roam around coatless like a drug in its tablet form. No capsule.

Is there a high-quality purchase for this high quality quality, which is waterproof, has no shameless property and stays with you till the end in your good and bad times?

When one wears premium purchase shame, others start projecting pity, and the one who created the portal gets access to the highest quality of shame in its raw form and pity in its allotropic form. That makes pity an allotropic form of premium purchase shame. It ain’t no purchase. It’s an experience that gets this premium purchase. A purchase full of shame with a strong willingness to hide every second of every day.

If someone asks you to have some shame, wear a coat and ask them, Do you have any shame at all?

They don’t know what they have is not the waterproof one, and they will reply with a YES, I DO!

But it’s actually…YES, I DID a few minutes ago; now it’s washed away.

How does it feel to wear premium purchase shame everywhere?

And… Who owns it?

Maybe eeriewearyweepy does.

Shame was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I didn’t decide to write this poem. It was just a random thought that I hadn’t written any poems for a while now. I thought, let’s take a break from writing poems and focus on my prose and drafted novels… but let me just write one more before I say goodbye to my poems this season.

And just like that, this was written.

I’ve realised that even after almost three years, or maybe two and a half, the feelings remain—not as strong, but still enough to let me know that, yes, I am still in love.

So, it does hurt a little to not write poems for a while now, but that’s okay. I hope that next time, when I write, I write for the same person. Maybe I’ll be reciting those poems beside them… or maybe not.

But I don’t want to change my muse ever!

The Last Poem

As the sun rises at dawn,
so does my love awaken
inside my heart,
every single day.

And every evening,
when the Pole Star shines in the sky,
I adore it a little more
because it carries your name.

As my love grew older,
like a fine wine,
my attraction to you
began to fade a little each day.

Now, only a small part of you
remains within my soul,
and your smile
still visits me in my dreams.

Love holds no power
when it is adored from only one end.
And yet,
this stubborn heart still wants to love.

Oh, dear star,
I will stop loving you
when the waves stop returning
to the ocean.

Oh, dear star,
this is the last poem
I am writing this season.

In the next,
my poems will rise again,
written beside you,
while your black eyes shine
in the rays of the first dawn. :))

The Last Poem⭐️ was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

DISCLAIMER: The entire story is filled with figurative languages, so the readers are advised not to take things *literally* here.

No doubt, there was something “supernatural” stirring in the air today, while I finally visited the Manikarnika Ghat. The godawful poems that had long been sitting in my drafts were suddenly flying around in the shape of sparks having emerged from the flames that desperately devoured every inch of the corpses; no wonder why I often kept hearing from my comrades that these flames were starving. They were certainly not joking. And I was wrong for assuming that they were using metaphors, just for the sheer thrill of it all.

My eyes caught the sight of those unfinished poems of mine polluting the aerial space, while a bunch of reverends and sages chanted hymns, demanding a God, whose face we’ve never seen and never will.

It was during this moment that I almost forgot to behave like a journalist with an objective lens. My bias completely engulfed me. A desire to become the witness of the tragedy crept up my skin, and tormented me until I finally gave in, perhaps because I had grown up seeing how my female relatives were never allowed to view funerals. The pyre thus assumed the shape of an iron magnet, and I became a metal. It dragged me towards it.

Like a moth to a flame, I trotted closer, just to read those sparks. I did not even saunter. My movement was fast-paced. Characterized by an inexorable slough of despond. Until a hand reached out and pulled me away from it.

Three hours later, I was seated on my bed, sipping a cup of chocolate milk and wondering how I even ended up mirroring the very inexplicable feeling that a benevolent stranger, living over four thousand kilometers away from me, once went through. He goes by the name Evan Lee, and years prior to when he’d sing what’d later become my call ringtone, he dealt with the very emotions I went through while rubbernecking at a klatch of swamis, dressed in saffron-colored drapes, accumulate around to watch the wrestle between the all-consuming fire and a soulless body. I recalled my father, who often talked about how he’d see the bones and flesh inside the corpse dance around in the flames — a scary movie, indeed! And this was when the subject of my thoughts himself approached me; he texted me with enthusiasm, “Heard that you had gone to the ghats and saw a pyre. Did you come up with any poem?”

I responded, “Not yet. But I had this song called Going Home playing in my mind. No wonder why the album is called DEATH OF ME.”

Yep. I immediately resorted to critically appreciate the album, until my father said:

“I’m not asking about the song. I want to talk about the ghats.”

I’m still unable to figure out what exactly caused him to respond in that way: perhaps because I committed a blasphemy by centering my experience with the Holy Ghats of Varanasi around a man-made art project, instead of delving into holy scriptures and myths that have long ruled the bricks and walls of that primordial site. And, my father does come from a family of Brahmins. So, there’s no denial to the fact that he must be knowing that every artist — including even me — is an anti-God, primarily because they’re dodging the very invincible thing, which snatches everything away from our hands. Death. Loss. It’s inescapable, unless you’re destined to be an ARTIST. And my father knows it goddamn well, because he used to be a poet too. Frankly speaking, he was more passionate than whoever I am right now. He penned congratulatory poems on blank pages, and folded them just so he could gift them to his peers whenever the latter would get married. Yet, the truth is, unless one is a bibliophile, they would not even care about reading a single word, so undeniably my father has dodged death a million times — at least, metaphorically. But even in the literal sense too, he has done it. My father once survived a soul-shattering road accident, back when I wasn’t even born yet. And perhaps, that was enough to convince him this.

Demise. Loss. Dire consequences of human flaws. Dolefulness. They’re requisite. Yet, a strict law is to be obeyed: you must not hold on to them, and let them shape your future as you move forward. However, the moment you bring out your pen to transform them into the Big Bad Muses, you’re no more God’s favorite idiot. For instance, when you hear ABBA, no one remembers Jesus Christ or the Holy Bible anymore; instead, we hear the melancholic instrumental that flourishes in “Slippin’ Through My Fingers”. God hates artists like us; he bestows them with the most agonizing moments imaginable, only for them to push forward with their sacrilege.

Well, do you see this? If yes, then allow me to introduce it. Going Home. It’s one of my favorite songs of all damn time. Currently, my call ringtone. Needless to say, I want this song to annihilate me. Chop my flesh, and devour my soul, like a cannibal it is. I need this song to torment me, both physically and mentally, until all I hear is this song only — in a way that regardless of my exhaustion and annoyance, the song keeps echoing, as though it replaced the God himself. Quite blasphemous phrases, I know. You can hold up that goddamn cross, if you want to, because after uttering these exact words, I almost fell to my knees today, for I know I won’t be able to love a human in the very manner I’ve done to this song — perhaps, because the lyrics reflect on the exhaustion that comes with fixating on end goals and being determined to fulfill them all, in a way that your art becomes an antichrist resolute in overcoming the Death himself, let alone the brute laws of River Lethe?

I sometimes want to drink the entirety of this River itself, yet I do not have the courage to. I shrug that prickly feeling off. I call the River a fictional entity, until the guilt shrouds me. Brushing this feeling aside is not that easy. Y’know, actions speak louder than words. So, even if I act like I do not really care and I actually cherish the hours of hard-work I do, I still affirm that… for a brief moment, I want to feel like those lazy, ambitionless girls from my college, who rely heavily on their boyfriends’ wallets, and thus, forget that they have so much to do as they go ahead in their lives. To sum it up… End up becoming trad wives? Bearing the kids of their narcissistic boyfriends who keep abusing them and exploiting them for their own selfish motives, while these girls try to sink in the sea of delusion? Hell yeah! Because at least, I won’t be tormented by the plans related to my future, or by a dilemma clouding me as I ask myself:

“What does my future exactly look like? Is my future self seated as a journalist, interviewing a successful pop artist who’s having a hard time realizing that finally someone is right here in front of him, dissecting a music video of his, while everyone else spent hours appearing irate over whom he’s *allegedly* dating? Or, is she a literature professor gossiping with a bunch of tempestuous, impulsive teenagers about how the Chinese BL drama, Deep In, has a mise-en-abyme structure mirroring the dire consequences of keeping your homosexual identity restrained in the closet?”

There’s a bliss in not being practical enough; I can barely deny that, because I’ve experienced it myself. I was never this resourceful woman, like I am right now. And in case you don’t believe my words, I would still not agree to introduce my obnoxious sixteen-year old self to y’all. For nearly two years, she lost her sanity over a man over four years older than her — engulfed by the sheer lust that consumed him, once he found out that the girl she had been chatting with was just turning seventeen. She frequently fantasized about obtaining the man’s surname, being adorned with a silky red dress as her newly wed spouse would whisper her name amid the loud Bengali chants. And honestly (in ChatGPT’s voice), that’s way better than losing your marbles over what certificate courses to enroll in, and whether the luck of yours shall favour you as you leave your homeland, and travel miles away into an unknown world, which would rather unfurl secrets hidden beneath an ornate layer of pretense and filmic hanky-panky.

And that enormously matters for me, because I’m stuck between the two worlds: becoming a kind of teacher whose memories would tickle the belly of the most successful people in the world till the day their body turns into ashes, or a journalist who is finally able to openly admire the artists she’s grown up idolizing. Perhaps, I can be both, too. But even then, I’m not an expert when it comes to overenhancing my articles SEO-wise. I certainly do not like motivating people at all. I feel like I suck at it. So, I just cannot sit down and randomly write an article called:

“Forget Medium — Here Are The Top Fourteen Blog Apps Where You Can Earn Around $100/Month”

It’s funny how despite saying all this, I’d cradle this same laptop on my lap, to write on a video called “Top 10 Scariest Movies That No One Dares to Recommend”. And, the plot twist: I actually love it. I’d rather yap about a cheap B-movie as though it’s a misunderstood masterpiece, than talk about stock markets, and this is what makes me unique among all the writers — I always thrive in spontaneity.

I’m a pick-me, when it comes to writing, or even studying. You heard it right. I study 24/7, and I often admit that I love doing so. To me, even cleaning my toilet after a brief constipatory moment counts as studying. I am that studious.

And then, above all lies this “Bad Desire” (ENHYPEN *wink wink*) of mine: living like an average bachelor man would. Not only I walk around in my room — completely nude, not even wearing pants at all — but also, I spend the whole day lecturing on why women longing for a rich man, instead of shattering the age-old conventions rooted in male supremacy themselves, are dumbass. Because, they actually are. Yet, I envy these girls, because they will never apprehend (nor will they endure) the agony that comes with the grind.

Just for a brief moment, can I condone the cost of independence? Or, waive the piles of exhausting work that render me privileged, or even fortunate? I’m sick of “having to work hard”. Sick of my “gotta-do-it” mentality.

These deliberations on my account, thus, transport me to the singer’s own past himself. For a moment, I find myself seated on a hospital bed, alongside the ten-year old Lee Heeseung. He barely knows me. He can barely even see me. I peer at everything going on, like a ghoul newshound delivering a candidly humorous report on “Exploring the Human Balderdash: How this 10-Year Old Mortal Battles A Fatal Trouble” (pun intended).

“Lymphoma.”

I’d never heard that word before, so at first, it sounded pretty cool, until it suddenly did not. I have no exact clue about why I have found diseases fascinating; I’ve always wanted to be affected by one. So, when I heard that the little boy knew of it after he frequently coughed during his soccer session until he could barely breathe, I grew blisteringly jealous. Jealous of the stories he’d get to tell in the future. Jealous of the paroxysmal fandom he’s destined to have. Jealous of the guitar his arms swathed while performing in the talent shows in front of all the patients and doctors, in the premises of a hospital that felt less like a “second home” and more like a graveyard to him — something that the inexperienced me would never seem to apprehend, for I would never know the overwhelm that engulfed him, as he watched his friends pass away, one-by-one. He just wanted to go home, quite opposite of what I’ve always desired for: living miles away from my home.

And fortunately, he dodged the Death, maybe because the latter sensed that he’d be an artist. But with that, a punishment was inscribed on his fate: the feeling of alienation, which kept growing, as he faced mockeries from his peers over his baldened head having resulted from the months of chemotherapy. And that rendered him an introvert. He was no more outgoing, as he was, before. I told you. God hates artists.

Heeseung shall never die. His soul will never rest. His heightened moments, both of Gehenna and Shangri-la, would linger in those vinyl records spinning around, thinking of themselves as the 134340 orbiting the Sun — now that he’s finally adopted the name that has always been close to his heart, and cogitated to express his authentic side.

“The conversation is now closed,” the PEOPLE article read, as I finally scrolled down to the bottom of the article, having come up with conclusions that would surely make me look like a parasocial moron. But even then, that’s just me being a gonzo-writer, Hunter S. Thompson-style! ‘Cuz he’s also still alive.

Plus, solely considering the fact that I can’t live without writing one single piece, maybe I’ll never die, too. And I fear it’s going to be the truth.

멈춘대도 This Ain’t the Death of Me was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hope is dangerous. It is powerful; a thing that can keep us going when it feels like there is no other reason. But that very thing can also keep us clinging to a thing that won’t ever happen. Stuck in a place of wishing that will never come true.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no beef with Hope itself. My issue is all the Expectations that come with it. Hope, in my mind, begins as a fleeting thing. A flickering flame that needs nourishing. Often, I snuff it out before it can grow too large. What I’ve learned is that hoping too hard can end in painful disappointment, whether I believed my hopes had a chance or not.

At some point, the Hope turns into a kind of Expectation. Something that feels more certain. If I work hard enough, if I dedicate myself, if I spend enough resources, surely my hopes will come true. Part of being “positive” and “manifesting” good outcomes seems to rely on the premise that if you just do all the right things, you will succeed.

But this isn’t true. It is an unfortunate reality we all must face at some point, and learn to come to terms with. Hope isn’t wrong. It isn’t the villain in the story. Expecting that it will somehow magically turn into success is what inevitably ends in frustration.

So…how do we hold Hope close without crossing the line into Expectation? It is a question that continues to vex me.

I want to write just for writing, and let the words fall where they will, be seen by those who happen to see, and be happy with that. I don’t want to get lost in the unrealistic High Hopes of being seen, noticed, interacted with.

I want my books to be happy sitting on a shelf where readers will hopefully see them, and stop feeling disappointed when I don’t have the energy to make a career of marketing. I Hope for success, but I only have the energy for placement. It’s hard to come to terms with the reality over the dream. My first erotica novel sold more copies than I thought it would…because I was on a platform where erotica was happily devoured and I had energy to market there. That is no more. The expectation I developed based on that experience has ruined the joy of publishing further work, because the Hope is too high. It turned into Expectation, which then went sour.

I Hope for time to write, get my thoughts out, allow them to straighten from the jumble of tangled twine that they are when stuck in my head, and eventually I expect that Hope to transform into writing time. I work toward making it a reality only to find I’m too exhausted from all the work to now have motivation to write.

This cycle has me wishing that Hope would leave me alone. That I could simply cut ties with that word and all the strings that come with it, all the Feels left unvalidated, all the Expectations that seem to take Hope’s place.

But on the other hand…Hope is what gets me to work every day and keeps me sane and thoughtful about the future. Hope helps me move through the tumultuous times we’re in. Hope that this country can still turn around. Hope that tyrants will indeed eventually get what they’ve earned. Hope that women and men will learn to coexist as a team rather than find reasons to hate and ridicule one another.

I Hope that one day, my Hopes can find a healthy place to reside where they don’t sneak off and become Expectations that are eventually dashed.

I Hope that my Hope can be a healthy, guiding force in my life, and not the smothering dread it has become.

I Expect that my Hopes are too high.

Great Expectations…and Dashed Hopes was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The leaves loosen themselves from the branch
and go down to the earth
as though told, long ago, the hour.

Does the tree feel them leave?
Does it hesitate at the stem?
Or is a leaf only a leaf,
a guest in the long rhythm of seasons?

Perhaps letting go is not a choice it makes
but the way it stays alive.
Some things must fall
because their part in the story is done.
Not erasure,
but completion.

So it is with people.
Some stay a lifetime,
some a season,
some only a moment
that leaves behind
more than its brevity could explain.

We loosen our hold
not because they meant little,
but because meaning alone has never made anything last.
Nothing stays unchanged,
not even those we thought we knew by heart.

Yet autumn is not only an ending.
The branches stand bare,
and inside them, quietly, green is waiting.
Some departures will ache long after
we have learned to live inside them.
Some endings will go unanswered,
like autumn skies that never explain
why that leaf, and not another.

Still, the tree remains.
And so must we,
not as who we were,
but as who we are becoming.

People may be chapters in our lives,
but we are the ones who live the whole story.
Perhaps the art of letting go
is learning to stay with ourselves
when they do not.

© 2026 Khushhh, All rights reserved

Bare Branches, Waiting Green was originally published in Shadows in the Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.