Shivani Kundu Poet Prose

Wasn't the Herd Complete Without Me? (Part 7-The End)

Maybe the moon was never the goal.

I wanted love without earning it. I forgot-love was never supposed to be earned.

External validation is borrowed light. It's not yours to keep. When it's gone, you're in the dark again - and worse, you've forgotten how to shine on your own.


That's not because I was broken. It's because I was waiting for someone else to remind me of my light-in my highs, and in my lows.

A star doesn't need permission to burn. It doesn't need an audience. It just burns-and the sky holds it anyway.

Likewise, I want someone to hold me the way the sky holds all its stars not to light me, just to hold me.

I still want the hug. The understanding. Someone who stays without needing a reason. That's not weakness. We were never meant to hold ourselves up alone.

But I don't want to earn it anymore. I want to already be lit, so love isn't the thing that switches me on-just the thing that gets to sit beside my light.

The herd was never waiting on me to be whole. It was whole with me, and it would have stayed whole without me- because that was never my job to complete it. I wasn't missing. I was just looking for myself in the wrong place- whether they needed me, instead of whether I needed myself.

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