River Words By Mir Aini

The fastest train does not move on tracks of steel, but on the quiet rails of time. It passes through us unnoticed, carrying away our days, our laughter, our unfinished sentences.

No whistle marks its arrival, no station holds it back. It does not ask for tickets or permission; it takes what it wants – the hours we thought we owned.

Across the world, pain wears many names. In Kashmir, it hides in the mountains where silence falls heavier than snow, where mothers count the hours by the echo of boots on the street. In distant cities, it hums beneath sirens and gunfire, the language of fear spoken fluently in every country. No border can fence grief, no flag can shield a heart from loss.

There are names the world forgets, faces blurred by time, but the heart has its own archive. It keeps every laugh, every silence, every half-finished word as though they are carved into stone. Memory does not fade like ink on paper; it lingers like a shadow that never leaves, even when the sun has gone.

Some promises are spoken not to last, but to soothe a moment, like a candle lit in the wind. They flicker briefly, convincing the heart to rest, and then disappear into darkness.

The silence that follows is not loud, but it presses, reminding you that hope can be as fragile as breath.

Grief settles here – in the space between words once believed and the emptiness that answers them. It is not the loss of what was, but the slow acceptance that nothing was ever given.

They gather quietly, shadows do, never asking for permission, never claiming their own names.

They stretch long over the earth at sunset, only to vanish at dawn, as if their existence is a joke the light tells the dark. Yet, in their silence, there is a kind of dominance – a reminder that even what has no form can govern what is seen.

No return address, no signature – only words pressed into paper with the weight of something unseen. It arrived one morning like an echo of a dream, slipped beneath the door as if the night itself had chosen me as its messenger. The ink was uneven, trembling, but the sentences carried a gravity that felt older than language itself.