Moon at Half Past Noon

We missed the actual snap. Found the plaster dust
on a Tuesday instead—gritty, like powdered bone
on the floorboards where the wall finally quit the ceiling.

Before that, the house breathed through the iron pipes.
A low huss. The settling of joints.
The smell of rain hitting the note of a cumin tadka.
The hallway clock beating like a dull, wet pulse.
It was just weather. It was the way things were.

Then the drop. Not a scream,
just the sudden missing of a weight
we’d been leaning on for twenty years.
I swept the grit into an old Nescafe jar.
I wrote The Before on the lid with a Sharpie
and let it sit.

Now, I don’t use bricks.
I use the gaps between the things I meant to say.
I’m living in the almost.
The house is a sketch drawn with a wet finger
on a hot stone—disappearing while you look at it.

At dusk, I light a single lamp—
not to find my keys, but to see the dark properly.
The shadows are the only chairs I need.

They say a foundation makes a home.
They’re wrong. It’s the way the draft moves
through the ribs of the place.
My floor is open to the sky now—
an unfinished Azaan, the call caught in the throat,
the exact second between the inhale and the sound.

I’m planting jasmine in the cracks.
Not to cover the mess, but because
I want to see if a scent can hold up a roof.
The roots are splitters. A quiet, slow-motion heist.

The neighbors ask why I stay
under the unsupported beams.
I just show them the moon.
A crooked, silver pillar standing
where the wall used to be.
That’s my new door.
It stays open.
No key.
Just the night.