On My Day

I sat with my own silence and I asked: what do I lack?
I rummaged through each corner, every alley, every crack.
But all I found was mercy, soft and layered like the light,
And all I felt was gratitude, enormous, burning bright.

Life has been a lantern held through every stretch of long,
And God, He has been Author, and He never wrote me wrong.
He placed beside me people, oh, the finest kind of souls,
Who held my brittle pieces when I couldn't hold the whole.

I had my parents. I had them, and I know what that was worth.
They gave me shape before I understood what shaping meant on earth.
I see them now whenever I try to be a parent right,
Their hands inside my parenting, their lessons in my light.

They are gone now, and the world is quieter in the way
that only children without parents understand, some ordinary day.
But I am their reflection. I am what they left behind.
And I am still trying to be worthy of the love they gave so blind.

I have a sister who is no longer here in the way that people stay.
She taught me courage, she taught me smile, she taught me raw is okay.
She will live inside my chest, and I will carry her with me still,
Until I walk through Jannah's gate and find her there. And I will.

I have a brother I love the way you love the child you raise,
Who grew into my pillar while I was living through my days.
Far in miles but close in everything, my anchor and my stay,
The one I know is there for me, even oceans and years away.

I have a partner, strong and steady, holding what I spill,
A root beneath my storm. The love that asks for nothing still.
The kind that doesn't need the words to know what's going on,
Who stays when staying is the hardest, and simply carries on.

I have my children. My children. Where do I begin?
They are the reason something soft still lives beneath my skin.
They are not mine to keep forever, only mine to raise,
And in their eyes I find the best and truest of my days.

And then the ones that Allah chose to add into our fold,
My in-laws, nieces, nephews, all the stories yet untold.
He picked them for us, I believe it, every single face,
To make the family stronger and to hold us all in place.

I have my cats. My cats. Where do I even start?
The way they walk into a room and rearrange my heart.
I did not know what I was missing until they made their home,
And now I cannot tell you how I ever was alone.

They do not come because I need them. They come when they choose.
And that, the choosing, is the kind of love you cannot lose.
They bring out something in me that no person ever could,
And I love them like my children, like I always knew I should.

And then there is a person, different, rare, unlike the rest,
Who carries what I carry and who knows my unspoken best.
Not partner, not by blood, and yet the knowing runs so deep:
The kind of soul that finds you, and is yours to keep.

I cannot tell you when or how they came to know me so,
But some souls simply find you, and they stay, and then you know.
They see the parts you haven't shown and love them all the same,
And being known like that, entirely, is the whole of what I claim.

I have someone who stays. Not because it is easy or fair,
Not because I make it simple or am always easy to bear.
They stay because they choose to, every time, without a word,
And the staying, quiet as it is, is the loudest thing I've heard.

Some people exist to show the world is a nice place,
That trust and loyalty still live, even at this pace.
A brain unlike the rest, a heart entirely pure,
The one who stays beside me, and in staying, is my cure.

I have someone who makes me feel like I am worth the space,
Who does it with such ease it feels like falling into place.
The way they care feels real, so real it takes me by surprise,
Not built or borrowed, just the truth that lives behind their eyes.
Calm and restless, still and bright, a contradiction, rare and true,
Mostly invisible, and yet they find me every time I need them to.

Someone texts me gently when the darkness pulls me in,
Someone calls me laughing when the joy begins to spin.
Someone drags me singing when I've forgotten how to try,
Someone who just loves me in a way I can't deny.

Someone chose even me, the raw, the rough, the real,
The unlikeable corners that I barely want to feel.
Someone loses something when they cannot hear my voice,
Someone waits in patience, not from duty, but from choice.

Someone worries tenderly the way that oceans do,
Quietly, relentlessly, and always pulling through.
They never say it loudly but you feel it in the way
they ask if you've eaten, if you're sleeping, if you're okay.

I have a work where I belong, a place that knows my name,
Where what I give means something, and I show up just the same.
Not every soul gets this, a work that feels like it was made,
A place that holds you steady when everything else starts to fade.

I have the gift of music, notes that find me in the deep,
I have a pen that never empties of the feelings that I keep.
Between the two of them they've saved me more than I can say,
The song that held the night, the word that carried me the day.

I have my health, I have my breath, the gift of one more try,
These are the things we overlook until the day they say goodbye.
I have a body that still works, I have a mind still clear,
And I am learning, slowly, what it means that I am here.

I have travel, the kind that lifts the weight right off the chest,
That shows you just how wide the world is, and how small the rest.
Every road a different story, every face a world unseen,
And I return more settled than I ever thought I'd been.

I have a book that brings me in and doesn't let me go,
That gives me other lives to live and other things to know.
A world between two covers, the best escape I've ever found,
Where pages hold me steady on the most unsteady ground.

And then a stranger. Just a moment, just a single phrase,
That landed like a lantern in the middle of a haze.
Someone who saw something true when I had stopped believing,
And what they gave me, I am somehow always still receiving.

And that, the more that passed me by, I thank Him for it too.
For what He kept from me was mercy, through and through.
He knew the weight I could not carry, and He bore it instead,
And every door He closed was keeping something safe ahead.

Alhamdulillah.
For all that filled my hands, for all that slipped away,
For answered prayers and silences that shaped my every day.

Astaughfirullah.
I have sinned. Small ones and big ones and the ones in between.
I am not who I should have been, and I know what I mean.
But the door is still open. It has always been ajar.
And He will take me back, exactly as I am, as far
as I have fallen, dust and all. That is the mercy I claim.
I turn back. I begin again. And He receives me just the same.

I am grateful He counted me among the ones who know,
Who have a door to knock on and a direction when they go.
I bring Him all my failures and my questions and my pain,
And He receives me, every time. He starts me up again.

He forgives. He wipes me clean. Not once, not twice, but every fall.
I still don't know what I did to be the one He chose to call.
But I am keeping faith, and I am waiting for the day
I reach the home He built for me, and I have found my stay.

And then He gave me Makkah. Let that settle for a breath.
He called me to His house across the ordinary stretch.
Of all the roads my life could have gone, of all I've known,
He kept me close enough to come. He walked me to His home.

I stood before the Ka'bah and I came completely undone,
Not weeping out of sadness, but from being the one
He didn't have to hold, and yet He held. And that alone
is everything. Alhamdulillah. I have never felt more known.

He gave me still, another dawn, another chance, a door,
Subhanallah, I am not finished, I am not yet on the floor.
I still have rooms to build, I still have bricks of light to lay,
My home in Jannah waits for me, and so I rise today.