Are You That Soul?

She doesn’t cry like they want her to

No tears in the spotlight, no perfume excuse

She just sips the dark by the windowpane

Where the light don’t reach, but her silence reigns

Velvet voice, heartbreak hips

She’ll break your heart with a bite of her lips

She doesn’t beg, she doesn’t bloom on demand

She’s not one thing, never fits in your hands

She’s the prayer and the sin

The whisper and the din

She’s the fire in the lace

The bruise behind the grin

You thought she was sweet

Oh baby, she’s steel

Wrapped in cashmere

With a heart you can’t steal

She’ll love you like jazz, off-beat, off-time

Then vanish like smoke at the end of a rhyme

No, she doesn’t need saving, doesn’t need the stage

She’s the ache in the room when you walk away

She’s old money charm in a thrift-store coat

Reads Rumi in red, with a cherry-stained note

Got a laugh like thunder, tears made of gold

You’ll never forget her even when she’s cold

She’s the wound and the balm

The chaos and the calm

She’s the sigh in the night

The storm that feels like home

No, she ain’t one thing

She’s the whole damn song

A little bit wrong,

And achingly strong

Whispered, like a secret

So don’t try to tame her, don’t ask her to stay

She was made for the midnight

Not your yesterday

But now tell me this,

Are you that woman?

The one they tried to fold into quiet

But who kept the fire anyway?

Are you the sigh, the spark, the smoke?

The one they almost understood

But never quite could?

Because if you are… this piece is for you.

But beneath every unforgettable woman is a story no one asked to hear.

There are women who laugh loudly

make everyone feel at ease and then go home to cry quietly into yesterday’s coffee.

Witty. Magnetic.

But haunted by echoes no one hears when the room goes quiet.

We call them light.

But they are galaxies collapsing politely in the corner.

There are women who seem hard,

Sharp-tongued, steel-backed.

You’d think nothing gets through.

But they carry other people’s pain like it’s stitched into the lining of their coat.

They feel everything, but have never been taught how to be held.

There are women who disappear in plain sight.

Always there.

Always kind.

But no one sees the war they fight just to get out of bed.

To stay gentle in a world that rewards cruelty.

They don’t shine. They glow.

Faint, steady.

Like a lighthouse no one thanks until the storm hits.

There are women who romanticize everything,

Write poetry on receipts, fall in love with strangers who never knew their name.

You think they’re naive.

But they’re just brave.

Brave enough to keep hoping in a world that makes you pay for that kind of softness.

And then there’s you.

The one who doesn’t fit any box.

Who holds multitudes, contradictions, unfinished sentences.

Sometimes a blade.

Sometimes a balm.

You walk into rooms and rearrange the air without speaking.

You are not loud but you are felt.

Your silence isn’t passive.

It’s precision.

You don’t explain, you see.

You don’t beg to be known, you listen.

You were never meant to be digestible.

You were meant to be a question. A mirror. A reckoning.

You don’t play by sheet music.

You bend notes.

Break rules.

Compose in blood and instinct.

Like jazz that bites back, like survival stitched in silk,

like a woman who became her own instrument

and played fire into every room she entered.

So I’ll ask you,

Are you that soul?

The one who holds the ache and the elegance?

Who’s made of both shadow and shimmer?

Who’s tender but unyielding when it matters?

Who doesn’t need to be understood by everyone,

just deeply, fully seen by the right ones?

Because if you are,

You’re not alone.

You’re just rare.

And rare doesn’t perform.

It pulses quietly like a secret only the stars dared to keep.

-Dura Ki Hana