They Say Girls Shouldn't Fall First

They say girls shouldn't fall first because it's desperate and vain. But look at what you made me do.

Look at what you made me do with your cathedral hands and the way you cradle quietude like a bird with broken wings learning to trust flight again. You turned me into a cartographer of impossible territories, mapping constellations in the spaces where your laughter used to echo, charting courses to kingdoms that exist only in the grammar of glances. What manner of alchemist walks among mortals, transmuting ordinary air into scripture with each exhale? What breed of magician makes a woman forget the architecture of her own armor?

They say falling first is writing love letters to ghosts. They say it's performing poems for the deaf. But have you ever tried to choreograph your heartbeat to match the rhythm of someone else's breathing? Have you ever attempted to translate the untranslatable,the way certain souls hold moonlight in their marrow, the way some voices sound like home in languages you've never learned? I became a scholar of shadows, studying the theology of your silhouette during those gatherings where only the faithful congregate, where I first discovered that devotion has many faces and not all of them are turned toward the seven heavens.

You don't know that I've become fluent in the dialect of your departures, do you? The syntax of your footsteps, the punctuation of your presence in rooms that forget how to hold oxygen after you leave. You don't know that I've been an archaeologist in the digital ruins, excavating fragments of your thoughts like pottery shards that might, if assembled correctly, spell out the hieroglyphics of who you are when no one is watching. Why did you have to be composed of all the elements that make my prayers feel insufficient? Why did the universe conspire to craft you from the blueprint of my undoing?

I know the algorithm of your dawns without ever having witnessed them,they taste like copper pennies and promises, like the kind of surrender that births prophets and sages. I can feel the weight of sacred words on your tongue like phantom limbs, like amputated prayers still reaching for their intended destinations. Do you understand what it means to want to become archaeology in someone else's sanctuary? To wonder if your name has ever been a typo in the manuscript of my midnight conversations with the Almighty, slipping between more appropriate requests like contraband?

They say girls who reach are girls who fall short. But I never reached, ya ruh. I became a lighthouse with no ships to guide home. I became a compass pointing toward the magnetic north while you existed somewhere beyond all cardinal directions. I learned to love the mathematics of longing,the precise calculations required to want someone without asking for ownership, to hope without trespassing on territory that was never surveyed for my kind of dreaming.

Perhaps there's already someone whose laughter has citizenship in your chest, whose name fits like a key in the lock of your morning prayers. Perhaps I'm just punctuation in the essay of your existence,a semicolon where someone else deserves to be the period, the exclamation point, the question mark that changes everything. And the cruelest mercy? That has to be enough. That has to be poetry.

But look at what you made me do nonetheless. You made me fluent in the language of almost, conversational in the currency of might-have-been. You made me a translator of silences, a collector of breadcrumbs that were never meant to lead anywhere. You made me fall first, fall like empires when their gods stop listening, fall like the first drop of rain that doesn't know it's starting a flood.

So I write this not as a manifesto of possession but as an excavation of surrender. I write to exhume myself from the cemetery of what-ifs, to perform last rites over the republic of my imaginings where your name was the national anthem. I petition the Divine Archivist to redact you from the footnotes of my heart if you were never meant to be a chapter, to perform editorial surgery on whatever this is before it metastasizes into something that could hollow me out completely. And if you were always meant to be the plot twist? Then I trust the Author to write our story in a font that leaves no room for misinterpretation.

They say girls shouldn't fall first. But look at what you made me do: you made me an anthropologist of my own destruction, brave enough to love in a dead language, fluent enough in hope to risk looking like I've lost my native tongue. You made me understand that falling isn't failure,it's just gravity finally having its way with hearts that were always too heavy for their own good.

And perhaps someday you'll decode these hieroglyphics and recognize the signature of the girl who learned your name like a wish she wasn't allowed to say aloud. Perhaps you'll excavate these words and smile, and light a candle for the anonymous devotee who loved you in metaphors, who hoped in riddles, who trusted Allah with the tender archaeology of wanting you.

Or maybe,and this is the possibility that keeps my lungs functioning,maybe someday we'll translate this together, your beloved and you, laughing at the cryptic cartographer I used to be, the one who thought loving you required code-breaking and cipher keys. Maybe you'll decode my dramatics with the tenderness of someone who understands that some truths are too fragile for plain language. Maybe we'll tell our inheritors about how the Divine Novelist writes the most exquisite plot twists when we trust the narrative arc, even when we can't read the handwriting.

Until then, I remain here in the margins, becoming someone worthy of love that doesn't require translation, evolving into a person deserving of either you or whoever the Cosmic Editor has typeset for me in a story I'm still too frightened to proofread.

They say girls shouldn't fall first because it's desperate and vain. But look at what you made me do. Look at how I became fluent in the grammar of breaking. Look at how sacred this cipher became.