Minha Hossain

Hey you,

I know things feel heavy right now.
The pandemic has shrunk your world into screens and numbers,
into daily counts and quiet fears.
You keep telling yourself that when this ends,
life will slow down again.
That normal will return.

I wish I could tell you that it does.

What comes next is not a single disaster,
but a strange acceleration.
Everything speeds up.
News cycles spin so fast that grief barely has time to land
before it is replaced by the next catastrophe.

Words lose their weight.
Atrocities are debated like policy preferences.
Genocides are justified.
Attacks are framed as self-defense,
and self-defense is framed as aggression,
depending on who acts.

Evidence of unspeakable crimes
circulates in files and reports,
and still, nothing happens.

You will scroll past suffering
between ads and memes.
You will see people argue over whether pain is real,
whether lives are worthy of mourning.

And slowly, without meaning to,
you will feel yourself going numb.

Social media, once a place you escaped to,
will begin to feel like a corridor of trauma.
Every refresh will carry another reminder
of how much hurt the world can hold.

You will close the apps,
then reopen them minutes later,
pulled by the same instinct
that keeps you staring at a wound
just to make sure it is real.

And then there is the uncertainty.

Images that look real but are not.
Voices that sound human but are generated.
Truth that feels negotiable.

You will catch yourself asking,
more often than you would like,
Did this actually happen?

The ground beneath reality
will feel less solid.

What hurts most
is not just that these things exist,
but that they have existed before.

The more you learn,
the further back the pattern stretches.

Decades.
Generations.

The crises you thought were unprecedented
reveal themselves as echoes.

Different names,
same suffering.
Different headlines,
same silence.

I am not writing to you
to take away your hope.

I am writing so you understand
that your sensitivity is not a flaw.

The numbness you fear
is not strength.

Staying human
in a time that rewards detachment
is its own quiet resistance.

You will still find moments
that slow the world down.

A conversation that feels honest.
A piece of music that reminds you
what tenderness sounds like.
A friend who refuses to look away.

These will not fix everything.
They will not stop the acceleration.

But they will remind you
that you are still here,
still feeling,
still capable of caring
in a world that keeps asking you not to.

Hold on to that.

You,
a little further down the road.

Hate me
Call me the bad guy,
The villain you curse when you cry.
Drag me through dust, through mud, through shame,
Crucify me first when you need someone to blame.

But where were you
When I drowned in the quiet?
When the tide pulled me under, And every hand slipped away,
Like promises lost to the break of day?

You used me up,
Fuel for your fire,
Left me running on empty,
Then broke me when I tired.
Now you sit high,
Pointing spears, casting blame.

You call me cold, cruel, bitter-
But did you ever wonder
What it took to make me this way?
Did you ever trace the cracks in me
Back to the hands that made them?
Or are you too comfortable
With the weight of your judgment
To bear the weight of my truth?

Its easy now, isn't it,
To label me, cast me aside,
Call me heartless, call me lost.
But every piece of me you scorn
Was forged from battles you never saw.

I didn't wake up angry--I grew into it.
I didn't choose this armor--it's forged from scars.
And if I'm the monster you see,
Maybe it's time to ask yourself
Who locked me in this cage to start with.