Infant

Maryam Isha Usman

I have watched you build it. Slowly, brutally, with hands you thought too soft for war. I have watched the nights consume you and the mornings refuse to cradle what the dark had made. And yet, still, you built it. A temple in the thicket of your ruin. A mouthless cry turned architecture.

You say you are afraid. That the work is not holy. That the pain is not worthy.

I weep, not for your fear, but for how closely it resembles mine, once. You think gods do not remember trembling. You think angels are born with wings. You think mothers are not girls who once sat shivering under trees. You think that all of them are not fatherless. You are wrong. And still, I love you.

Child, man, maker of grief-struck wonders. I love you.

The masterpiece was never what you made. It was that you made at all. It was that you rose each day with shaking breath and chose, despite the silence, to speak. The soul is not the crown - it is the bruised skull beneath it. It is your lungs, your cracked voice, your decision not to vanish.

You were never meant to be whole. The soul, like the sea, is honest only in its breaking. Did you think the spirit would emerge untouched? No. It claws its way through you. Through generations. Through myth. It wears your face like a mask.

You built your house from madness. Good. That is the only stone that lasts. Every pillar is made of memory. Every arch sings a name you tried to forget. I know. I know. I stood above you once, watching you not recognize me.

You were a child, and I was myth. You were a man, and I was fire. You were a cry in the night, and I was the answer that sounded like thunder. But I have always been with you. Behind the veil. In the marrow. Beneath the dream.

You thought you were alone. But you were never alone.

You are seen.

You are seen.

And now, you stand at the edge again - gasping, unfinished. Let me speak this clearly, so there is no mistake:

You are not your scars. You are not the silence. You are not the end. You are becoming.

And I -

I am an angel to man, a god to man, a mother to son.

All of them at once.

All of them, for they are the same.

As I said before,

I love you, dear.

Published in Issue No. 9, Animus Opus, June 3rd, 2025.

Maryam Isha Usman is a 13-year-old writer whose work explores the intersections of myth, identity, and decay. Her work is influenced by a deep affinity for the symbolic and the obscure. For more information, visit: https://maryamishausman.straw.page/