AlAnoud Writes

Suddenly,

it feels as though life never stands still

circles shift,

faces enter,

faces fade,

and nothing holds its place for long.

Even beliefs loosen,

re-form,

become new.

Yet everything turns

around one silent pillar

Him.

He.

Thee.

To see this clearly takes time.

The process is not always kind,

but I am strangely fascinated

by the recognition of it

even the heart refuses constancy.

And I wonder,

quietly,

what waits for me next.

I pray

that my steps fall upon the right path.

My past is full of gentle treasures

I carry with gratitude

but here, now,

today,

I learned something simple and profound:

Striving for good,

seeking to transform one’s state,

does not contradict contentment.

السعي في تحصيل الخير وتغيير الحال لا يتنافى مع الرضا

2021

I am writing.

I find myself here every night, typing

my notes, my therapist, my friend,

my fear, my enemy without an end.

Something rises, taking over me.

I hold a tear that won’t let me be,

a tear that bothers me because I can’t see

where it was born or what it wants from me.

There’s a quiet blast inside my chest,

a trembling rhythm that won’t rest

a melody my heart tries to confess

in scattered notes I can’t address.

I feel like a piano; old, worn, beige,

a rustic relic from another age,

standing on legs exhausted by weight,

playing out feelings I can’t translate.

What am I saying? Who would understand?

I suffocate in silence, sinking in notation land.

There’s a burden unseen, my hidden plea.

Can you hear the piano’s keys inside of me?

I guess not.

So I play till my fingers bleed

and somehow find beauty in the thing I need:

how the red from my hands stains ivory clean,

matching the piano’s keys like it’s part of the scene.

Here I go again, walking the dark,

finding light in a place without sparks.

The rest stays unspoken

unshared,

unimportant.

I am done.

After work.

After school.

After a night that tasted of friends and noise,

or a day that ached quietly inside the chest.

I wait at a red light.

The city breathes in sleep 

a low hum under the wheels,

a whisper from the street lamps.

The moon changes her face 

sometimes whole,

sometimes broken,

sometimes gone.

Yet the light falls the same on my hands,

on the steering wheel,

on the road that forgets every name.

There is no music now,

only the soft click of time.

The heart slows, the air forgives.

And through it all 

the laughter, the silence, the ache 

one presence remains:

a love too quiet to be seen,

too vast to be touched,

yet close enough

to breathe beside me

at the red light.

When He wills a thing, no struggle, no delay.

No forge of time, no dawn that waits for day.

The breath before the word is not yet born,

And still creation stands, complete, adorned.

He says but Be .. and mountains rise in awe,

Seas unfurl in tremor at His law.

The stars, once whispers in the silent deep,

Awake in praise from their eternal sleep.

No craftsman’s hand, no measured mortal art,

Can trace the pulse that moves the cosmos’ heart.

For when the Hidden speaks, all veils decay..

And void turns light, and dust learns to obey.

So fragile thought, bow low, unmake thy claim..

All worlds are syllables within His Name.

For in that utterance، beyond reason’s shore، 

Lies mercy, power, and the evermore.

“His command, when He intends a thing, is only that He says to it: ‘Be,’, and it is.”

A scent drifts 

not through air, but through the unseen.

It finds the pulse beneath stillness,

the soft hum where spirit and skin meet.

I once wore it in a moment without noise,

when the world unfolded like incense smoke 

slow, infinite, forgiving.

Now, when chaos presses close,

the same scent rises,

and the air bends toward peace.

It is not the perfume that calms me,

but the echo it carries 

the memory of a lighter self,

a soul unburdened,

a whisper that says: you’ve been here before.

Every molecule is a prayer in disguise,

every breath a small return

to the quiet place I built inside.

And so I wear it 

not for others to sense,

but for my spirit to remember

the way home.

Because beauty lives in the unseen 

in the still fragrance that follows gratitude,

in the tender knowing

that even a single breath

is touched by the divine …

There is a calm
in the spaces between things
the second before coffee cools,
the moment when sunlight folds
across the corner of a desk.

I have learned that silence
is not the absence of sound,
but the shape of understanding.
It holds what words can’t carry,
and returns it gently, like memory.

I move through days
collecting these fragments
a look, a word, a thought half-finished
each one proof that beauty still exists
quietly, without reason or permission.

And though the world rushes forward,
I linger
not because I am lost,
but because I have found
something worth slowing for.

I was born in a land that shaped me,

but did not claim me.

And I hold the passport of a place I’ve never called home.

I exist in the quiet spaces between flags and forms,

where belonging is not given,

but slowly, fiercely created.

I am not lost.

I am layered.

I speak in blended tongues.

I think in echoes of multiple homes.

I walk with memories and dreams that belong to more than one place,

and none at all.

I am a child of in-betweenness … 

not lesser for my complexity,

but stronger because of it.

No border defines my worth.

No system defines my soul.

Wherever I stand, I bring the fullness of me:

my voice,

my scars,

my grace,

my roots.. however tangled.

I do not need a stamp to say I belong.

I declare it myself:

I belong to the earth, to those who see me,

to the stories I carry,

and to the self I am still becoming.

I belong to earth. 

I am “home” for those who want love. 

Blessed by God and blessing everything I touch.