What Are You Good At?A Confession in Light and Dark

I am good at dissolving.
Not disappearing—
that would imply a neat erasure—
but the slow seep of ink into water,
the way truths unbutton themselves
in dreams that wake too early.

I am good at
living in parentheses.
I have built a cathedral
inside a bracket.
Masses are held in whispers.
My congregation?
Unwritten poems and
the ghosts of alternate lives
that kneel beside me
in silence.

I am good at
the things no résumé dares mention—
holding the hands of broken clocks,
loving people as if they were questions
posed in a language I forgot in childhood,
screaming into pillows like they are tombstones.
Not from pain.
From remembering too much.

I am good at
being two people,
sometimes seven,
sometimes a gallery of selves
each framed in a hallway
of unclaimed names.
Every mirror has its own verdict.
Some call me betrayal.
Some call me origin.

I am good at
seeing the inside of words.
How “loneliness” hides “one,”
how “answer” holds “war,”
how “together” contains
“get her”
and some days I don't know
if I'm the hunted or the wound.

I am good at
touching the tender space
between a mother’s silence
and her gaze.
Between the prayer she whispered
while braiding my hair
and the fear that wrapped it.
Do you know how heavy it is
to carry your lineage
like a fault line?

I am good at
staring too long
into nothing.
Not because I’m lost—
but because nothing
sometimes feels like
home.

I am good at
being the child
that the adults forgot
in the metaphor.
The one who stayed
in the burning house of metaphysics
and asked
why fire has no shadow.
And still—
I ask.

I am good at
the algebra of ache.
At mapping memories
like constellations of bruises.
Each scar a coordinate,
each sigh a syntax.
The body is not a temple,
it’s a ledger.
Mine is etched in mistakes
I called miracles at the time.

I am good at
naming my fears
in extinct dialects.
At cradling rage
like an heirloom
and polishing it
with inherited shame.
Yes, I know how to make grief
look ceremonial.
You should see
my altar of unsent letters.

I am good at
listening to people’s silence
more than their speech.
Reading the way someone
puts down a glass.
The rhythm of absence
when they don’t say goodbye.
It’s a science,
this art of decoding voids.
And I—
I am its apostle.

I am good at
carrying hunger
that is not for food.
A hunger that howls
in libraries.
That climbs ribcages
and writes manifestos
on the insides of my lungs.
Do you know that kind?
Where you chew meaning
but never swallow it whole?

I am good at
resurrecting moments
no one else remembers.
Like the time a stranger
brushed past me
and I felt
like an unfinished sentence.
Like a comma misplaced
in their breathing.
They didn’t stop.
They didn’t need to.
I archived it anyway.

I am good at
waiting for rain
in cities where the sky
has forgotten how.
I keep an umbrella
not for storms,
but for metaphors
that might drip unexpectedly
from tired clouds.

I am good at
being an unfinished answer.
People come with hammers.
They leave confused.
I do not unfold easily.
I do not end neatly.
I am the question
on the back of your tongue
when you say nothing
but think of every
unspoken god
you buried in your youth.

I am good at
resistance.
To simplicity.
To being tamed.
To binary claims.
I have never been
just ‘this’ or ‘that.’
I am good at
being spectrum,
being blur,
being the refusal
to be swallowed
by easy language.

I am good at
becoming myth
in my own bloodline.
No one tells my story
because I have buried it
beneath too many
layers of metaphor
and martyrdom.
Sometimes,
even I forget
the beginning.

I am good at
writing poems
no one reads
but God.
And I’m not even sure
She knows how to read
what I mean
between the syntax
and the surrender.

So,
when they ask:
"What are you good at?"

I exhale
centuries of aching alphabets,
wrap silence in barbed punctuation,
and whisper—

I am good at surviving
what no one ever admits
they lived through.

And turning it
into fire,
into fog,
into fractured light
on a wall
where shadows dance
to the rhythm
of my refusal
to vanish.

I am good at
wearing wrong shoes to weddings
– velvet boots to a beach reception –
and peeling clementines during funerals,
slowly, methodically, like solving an algebraic affair
between orange and gravity.

I am good at
losing umbrellas
but not in the rain—
no, in elevators, laundromats,
inside books I lent but never got back,
umbrellas sprouting in forgotten margins.
Ribcage handles.
Canopy dreams.

I am good at
mistaking metaphors for living things—
hugging similes,
watering irony,
feeding paradox toast with unsalted butter
and whispering to hyperbole
like it’s my only child.

I am good at
not finishing things.
Half a quilt,
quarter novel,
three-eighths apology.
Even this sentence is
(fragmented, yes, I know)

I’m excellent at collecting
the dust that gathers atop
old ambitions:
the ballet shoes, the calligraphy pens,
a language I only learned enough
to say “I am not ready.”

I am good at
imaginary arguments—
in the shower,
on the stairway,
with people I’ve never met
about things they never said.
I win. I lose. I deliver speeches
to invisible applause.

I am good at
building shrines from spare parts:
wishes I never made,
buttons from coats I never wore,
and secrets I keep from even myself,
tied with floss and lavender
under the floorboard of my skull.

I am excellent at
naming the birds
that don’t exist:
smokesparrows,
melancholarks,
inkpeckers,
those that migrate through
nostalgia alone.

I am good at
turning my name into an equation
I cannot solve.
X equals the sum of
what I meant to do plus
what I did not say
divided by
the years I was a silence
in someone else’s calendar.

I am good at
answering questions
like
“What are you good at?”
with
this.

With erratic verse and
grammar that drinks alone
on weeknights.
With punctuation that hangs
like misplaced constellations
on your GPS heart.

I am good at
breaking clocks.
Not literally—though once
I did snap a watch in two
during a tango with time
that ended badly—
but metaphorically.
My life is GMT + nonsense.

I am proficient in
awkward entrances.
And exits.
In arriving either too soon
or too human.
My shadow always claps
a second before me.
My echo arrives
only when I’ve forgotten
what I said.

I am good at
falling in love with
photocopies of ideas.
The smell of carbon paper.
The hiss of old scanners.
The notion that somewhere,
someone is still writing
letters by candlelight
to no one.

I am good at
mistranslating myself.
Each morning
I look in the mirror
and mispronounce my reflection.
I tell myself:
Today, you are almost
a sentence.

I am fluent in
pauses.
The kind that gather dust
between spoken words.
I’ve filed for citizenship
in ellipses…
I sleep under commas
and wear colons like brooches.

I am good at
constructing arguments
between elements that don’t belong:
fire and cello,
salt and absence,
paperclips and heartbreak.

I am good at
not being good.
At being approximate,
an asymptote of purpose,
an ellipse of intent.

I am good at
growing gardens
of maybe.
Tomatoes of if only.
Basil of could be.
Weeds of what if
that I water
with dreams
and prune
with sleep.

I am good at
failing magnificently.
Falling with flair,
with jazz hands.
I trip on my metaphors
but pirouette into ambiguity.
Critics call it “style.”

I am a maestro of
forgetting why I entered the room.
A champion of
starting conversations
in the middle
and ending them
before the plot twist.

I am good at
walking away
from neat conclusions.
Good at turning answers
into additional questions
into poems
into paper planes
I hurl
at the moon.

I am good at
saying
I am good at things
that cannot be
graded,
promoted,
monetized.

Good at
being a lighthouse
for ships that only exist
in my daydreams.
A compass with no true north
but impeccable rhythm.

I am good at
being
a footnote in my own biography.
An asterisk in a love letter
to the future.

So when you ask me—
“What are you good at?”
I will smile like a misplaced semi-colon,
sigh like a book on its last page,
and offer you
this unorthodox
little thing,
my avant-garde
confession.

Because if I am good at anything,
I am good at being
this –
a collage of
“almost,”
“maybe,”
and
“nonetheless.”