Continued passage from my poetry pages..
You don’t owe anyone the story of how you got here. You don’t owe them the messy parts or the quiet nights or the versions of yourself you had to bury just to keep going. You owe them nothing. And maybe that’s the part that scares you. Because for so long, you measured your worth by how much of yourself you were willing to give away. How much you could bend before you broke. How gracefully you could fall apart and still show up the next morning like nothing happened. But the desert doesn’t care about any of that. The desert only knows one truth. You are either here or you are not. And you are here. Not the watered down version. Not the one who smiles when she wants to scream. Not the one who makes herself palatable so the room doesn’t shift when she walks in. The real one. The one that terrifies you a little. The one whose power you have been tiptoeing around your entire life because nobody taught you what to do with a fire that big. But you know now. You feel it in the way the light hits your skin and doesn’t ask you to dim. You feel it in the silence between breaths where something ancient whispers your name and tells you it has been waiting. And I think that’s why I fell in love with the desert. Because it doesn’t perform. It doesn’t soften itself for you. It just exists, enormous and unapologetic, and dares you to do the same. It held a mirror up to me made of nothing but sand and sky and I saw myself clearly for the first time in a long time. No noise. No pretending. Just the raw, unedited version of a soul remembering what it was built for. You are not becoming someone new. You are returning to someone you left behind a long time ago. And they have been so patient with you.
Gown @taali.ae
Shot by @jessejesie
Styled by @altishyousaf
Hair & Makeup @manalbeautystudio_
Jewelry @outhousejewellery@tanyaxshm
Studio @youbynara
#desert #poetry #taali #dubai #kenya
