Here are a few things I learned in the one month we haven't spoken.

Metamorphosis, as you're aware, is a common occurrence in the entomological world. And I've been watching time lapses of insects, growing and dying.

Like how ladybugs go from little yellow buds on the tree to an empty shell to a natural death if they are lucky; or to a meal if they are not.

Changing so much and so eloquently, it's hard not to be envious.

When you can see the part of you, your old self discarded once and for all and never look back again,

don't you wish you could change like that?

In their final form, the bright red color they finally assume makes it less appetizing to predators. (Much like humans)

The lacewings are tiny little bugs that drape the carcasses of their prey over them like a cape to camouflage themselves from larger insects.

The desert locusts when well-fed are solitary creatures. However, in case of scarce food, they bunch up together to search for leaves to survive.

There's a point to this. I think.

I think that you and I are too similar. And this kind of similarity shouldn't come so naturally.

I think we've met before. In a grocery line, or maybe our shoulders brushed while we got on a bus, maybe you helped me up with a change.

I'm bad with faces. But maybe we met, we touched, and through some form of psychometric miracle that I know nothing about, we exchanged parts of our souls.

Or maybe you found one of my old selves, shed off like dried skin and decided to keep it because you liked how it looked on you.

Maybe I killed you because you reminded me too much of myself and I am not too fond of myself.

And now I wear you, draped onto me like an omnipresent silhouette, for it still terrifies me to be seen.

I know there's a way of leaving without one of the two being dead, but I can't seem to figure it out.

In inanimate objects, in memories, the sea of the people I've lost looks like a war zone.

I thought I had learnt to tame this beast of solitude and be fine with the blood on my hands but it kept turning on me.

I had become so touch-starved that I clung onto every stranger with a kind smile like driftwood. And you were the only one this far away from the shore.

But you messed up, you got too comfortable.

To think that I wouldn't much rather swallow this log whole, and drown with its weight than to reach out to someone who isn't reaching back just as desperately.

I'm not sorry.

I'm not sorry that I only had room for tenderness in my life and I owed myself to not tolerate anything else. Not even once.

Don't you know why I owe myself that?

In a dream, God asked me What did I ever do, in this world, of love?

And I replied that I had, for the most part, not been cruel to anybody.

"That is not the answer to my question."

I remember waking up with wet around my eyes.

What was I talking about again? There was a point to this. I swear.

Anyway, what are you up to? Nowadays?

Don't answer that.

Faiza Ramim is in her final semester at IBA, University of Dhaka. When she's not increasing her Spotify minutes listening to Car Seat Headrest, she likes to write sad poems; or sometimes both simultaneously. Her new book New Beginnings and Other Terrible Things is out now.