The ballads of grief are sung in the moonlight. You were a minute old when you knew this story predates your mother’s mother’s mother’s birth. But the knowledge within was older still, notched inside you like food through the umbilical cord. And there it had coiled since you were but a seed, pulsating under your navel and releasing into the air on the sharp crescendo of your first cry on the eighth of Shaʽbān. The window panes shattered. The town mourned. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. Untold destinies are as silent as they are cyclical.

The ballads of grief are pelted after midnight. A hail storm shattered the forge of your third birthday. You had known it would come. The assurance had thrummed your blood like a rain song, changing the rhythm of your pulse to match the dance of the clouds you had followed all day. You waited until the house was asleep and then tiptoed down the stairs to crawl through the window, your stubborn garden of brambles shining silver in the dark. It had known you would come. Smiling, you stood beneath the raging sky, and let the stones rupture the frozen memories locked inside your skin.

The ballads of grief are spelt at sunrise. You were seven when the scribes rode past your house to reach the edge of the town where the canal bridge kisses the horizon. They spread their arms, murder red cloaks hanging off bony shoulders, their collective voices rising amid water-laden rice fields in a gentle lullaby of death and sounding off words to an uncaring dawn. Words which the priests decreed would not reach you because the summer winds had been forced in the opposite direction. Words which woke you in your bed miles away. Melodies—treacherous threads of fractured rhymes—bind lost truths in the hollow spaces between consonants, and the void, like the soul, is independent of physics. It cannot be contained.

The ballads of grief are strung before twilight. At fourteen you first saw the weavers sitting cross legged by the riverbank, bone-carved needles at the ready. They sang and knitted to the rhythm of the water, graceful loops conjoined like a net of iridescent pearls. It is a blanket of three fragments: a handful of watered-down verses, a tablespoon of earth from a dying rose, and two mouthfuls of blood coagulated at the center of a broken heart. The melody of their bleeding chants threads the intricate lattice together; the loops carried and sold all the way down south to the city by the sea rumored to be cursed by butterflies yet protected by saints. When you asked as to why that was so—why blood, death, and lies were crucial to sustain any kind of life—you were shushed and scolded into silence. To question old, renewed rituals is an offense punishable by death. You never told them you didn’t care because to live halved was worse. Souls rendered in parts care not for time or trials. But they tried nonetheless.

The ballads of grief are burnt in the sunlight. Agony came rumbling mid-afternoon the summer you turned sixteen. You were full and drowsy from multiple glasses of cool lassī, eyes heavy with lazy sleep. The knife that tore your insides was invisible, unlike the pain which pulled the blood from your veins and pooled it under your tongue, between your thighs. You fell on your knees, crawling to the door where the smoke from the burning paper curled around you like a hug. Cheeks glistening, you smiled at the horrified priests. If only they knew the vows they wanted to kill were branded on your bones.

The ballads of grief are silenced by knights. You tried to leave this home-that-wasn’t the day you turned eighteen. And again at nineteen, twenty-one, twenty-three, and countless times after. The punishments worsened with age and you shed many a tear. When they shaved your hair in the marketplace or lit candles under your fingertips until you stopped feeling your skin, the skies cried alongside you. The only time they didn’t—the only time you, too, grinned—was when they embedded in your path the spikes plucked from your garden. Your mouth curved wide when the town gasped. Your heels refused to bleed.

The ballads of grief are hidden in plain sight. The rebellions did not quell by the time you turned thirty. But you were wiser now, having learned to scatter pieces of your being where they could only be seen and gathered by the one who found beauty in all your monstrous edges. It took many years, but slowly you managed to hide it all. In the dewdrops that dance on cactus spines, and the barbs that cling to pinecones. On the soft bristles of dispersing dandelions, and the shrill thorns of all bougainvillea known. There were other, less obvious gifts, too. Fossilized fishbones and leftover toothpicks. Rough, abandoned bristle stones and the broken tip of a once sharp pencil. Needles found in a hay stack and the crooked nails plucked from the shoemaker’s cart. Jagged ends of neem tree leaves and the spiky disk florets in the center of sunflowers. The last morsel of your soul, though, you saved for the best.

The ballads of grief are collected by fireflies. They had fluttered and buzzed eons before you, trapping the truth inside the heart of the star that would die to become your dust. The tale of the Keeper of Thorns and her beloved, the Queen of Rain. One from the earth, the other of the heavens, they met by the riverbanks and merged into one. Until one not fine day, the jealous moon and sun cursed both their beings, exiling the Keeper into a human body, renouncing the Queen to die unseen. Forlorn, the witness river cried, leading to a flood which birthed a hillside. The hill soon became a village, the village a town. Pretty soon you came to dwell in the land which held your soul abound. But alas, the people turned fickle, and soon they lost their way, knitting false tales with real ones to rupture what should never have been torn away. The wonders of the universe are more fickle, though, and she writes mysterious tales, for the ballads of grief are sung in the moonlight to keep truths forever unveiled. So, on the witching hour of your thirty-third year, you ditched the night patrol, and pricking your finger on a spindle wheel, promptly found your soul.

The ballads of grief, sung in the moonlight, belong to the shadows.

The ballads of grief, sung in the moonlight, are yours to seize and swallow.