The Boy Who Spoke Like the World

By Roshan Tara

I’ve always loved wandering

new faces, new corners,

stories whispered between sips of coffee

and passing trains.

But then I met him

and every road I walked afterward

seemed to lead back to him.

He was different

so young, yet his eyes

carried the exhaustion of old souls,

as if he’d seen too much

of a world that never learned to be kind.

He spoke like someone

who’d swallowed the language of storms,

each word deliberate,

heavy with meanings he’d never explain.

When I asked about his dream,

he smiled—a small, tired curve

and said,

“I just want to be a good father someday.”

A father.

To children still written in the future.

And I wanted to ask

who would remind him

that he’s still a boy,

still tracing constellations

with ink-stained hands

and sleepless eyes?

He talks like thunder trapped in a quiet body.

Sometimes his words sting,

sometimes they save me

like truth disguised as kindness.

Not all lives bloom in sunlight.

Some grow in rain,

in the cracks between yesterday’s ruins.

And maybe he’s one of those

a boy made of broken glass and soft resolve,

who learned to build light from what cut him.

I admire him

his stubborn hope, his hunger for meaning,

his need to protect what he doesn’t yet have.

But life isn’t a competition of suffering, is it?

Sometimes, we are allowed

to simply exist.

To rest our hearts on the silence.

To breathe without purpose.

To watch the sky shift

and call it enough.

So I hope one day,

he learns to pause

to let laughter spill like morning light,

to forgive himself for not being infinite.

Because this life

this brief, fragile, miraculous life

isn’t meant to be endured,

it’s meant to be felt.

And I hope when he finally stops running,

he realizes

he was always enough.

Even before the world told him to be more.

By Roshan Tara