One. Some people come into the world for one reason alone: to love a single person. They spend their entire lives loving, and in that loving, they exhaust themselves. They ask for no grand dreams, no kingdoms; they ask only for a pair of eyes in which to find their own world. They do not claim happiness—they claim only the right to love. Their love never reaches completion, yet they love in silence, in selflessness, in utter surrender... In their eyes hides the spell of waiting; in their smile, the tears of pain. Yet they smile, because for them, love is the incantation of survival. In every dawn, in every breath, they search for that one person—the one for whom they rose from the dead once, yet despite all their devotion never received that love in return. Perhaps this is destiny. Two. Take my hand... we will walk through the silence, breaking through the city's blue light. The sleeplessness pooled beneath your eyes, I will wipe away with a gentle kiss, the way frost on a winter morning dissolves from a windowpane. How long have you fought alone, tell me? How many nights have you buried your face in your pillow and hidden your own weeping from yourself? Silence too has a sound; the heart too has its tears; and love has an invisible hand. From the long night of sorrow, I will steal a dawn for you—one where the sun rises slowly, gently. We will walk hand in hand to Ramna Park. There will be no hurrying, no reckoning, only the peaceful rise and fall of your breathing. The storm that breaks itself inside your chest each day—I will stand beside it like a window, letting in light and air. Sleep will come to your eyes at night like soft dew. And my love is the proof of this: you are not alone. Night will end, believe me; the deeper the darkness, the nearer the dawn. Take my hand. I will carry you across the wasteland of sorrow into the country of restful sleep, where dreams do not shatter, where the heart simply rests as it knows how to.
# Dawn Thieves The dawn breaks without permission. That's what I've come to believe—that light doesn't arrive, it *steals* in, a quiet burglar who knows exactly which locks to pick. I was never an early riser. My mother used to say I slept the way others lived—with complete faith in the darkness. But something changed after I turned forty. Or perhaps nothing changed; perhaps I simply ran out of reasons to stay asleep. The first time I stole dawn, I wasn't trying to. I woke at four-thirty, and instead of turning back into the pillow, I got up. The house was still holding its breath. Even the old refrigerator hadn't yet learned to hum. I made tea—just one cup, carefully—and sat by the window. The sky didn't announce itself. That's the secret. If you're waiting for trumpets, you'll miss it entirely. The darkness simply *becomes* less convinced of itself. A grey whisper spreads across the rooftops. The tin sheets catch something—is it light, or just the memory of light? Then the parrots begin. Not all at once. One first, somewhere three houses away. Tentative. As if asking, *Is it safe? Is it really morning?* By five o'clock, a few others have noticed too. Across the lane, in that small flat where the widow lives, someone turns on a light. I wonder if she also wakes without reason now. If she too has discovered this theft. The tea went cold. I didn't drink it. Now I do this every morning. I steal dawn before it becomes official. Before the world wakes and claims it as its own. There's a peculiar intimacy in being awake before the day begins—as if the morning hasn't yet learned how to be public, how to put on its necessary faces. Sometimes I see the neighbor's son leaving for his early shift. He nods at me, vague and sleepy, never quite present. He hasn't learned yet that these stolen hours are the only ones that belong entirely to you. My wife still sleeps. She doesn't ask why I'm up. After thirty-seven years of marriage, we've learned that some silences are deeper than questions. Yesterday, I stole dawn and found the street wet with rain that had fallen while I slept. The smell came up from the earth—that old, honest smell that only happens when no one is watching. I stood in it. It was a kind of prayer, though I've never been religious. The day will come when I can't wake anymore, when my body betrays me more completely than it already has. The doctors say I have perhaps ten years, maybe more. They're careful with their certainties, these modern men of science. But they can't steal my mornings. No one can. Not while I'm still breathing. So I will keep doing this. Night after night, I will come to the window before the world wakes. I will watch the grey become gold, the silence become sound. I will steal these hours back from sleep, from age, from all the years I spent not paying attention. Because dawn, you see, is not something you earn. It's not something you deserve. It's something you simply *take*—quietly, without apology, while the rest of the world still dreams. And the morning—the true morning, the one that exists only for those awake to see it—never tells.
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