This poem explores the human experience in the digital age and the spaces we preserve for ourselves
A phone glows in the dark.
We forget.
Screens do not.
Once, we carried memory in our hearts,
soft, imperfect, gentle with time.
A childhood voice,
a mother calling us home,
the smell of rain on dusty earth,
a laughter that lived only in our minds.
We remembered what mattered,
and time erased the rest with mercy.
Now memory lives outside us.
Screens remember more than our souls.
Devices never sleep,
and they never forget.
Every tap, every glance, every late-night ache,
captured and stored in places
we can never fully reach,
while our own memories slip
like sand through tired fingers.
We drift between past and present,
haunted by moments we cannot reclaim.
We age,
but our data stays young.
We heal,
but the records do not.
We forgive,
but the traces remain.
We learn to watch ourselves
before anyone else can.
We curate our smiles,
adjust our truths,
polish our moments
into versions that feel acceptable.
Somewhere in the quiet editing,
we forget the taste
of being real,
of chai steaming on a morning balcony,
of wind teasing hair,
of a bird’s song crossing the courtyard.
Technology hums around us
like a quiet, unblinking witness.
It guides, comforts, connects,
yet it watches.
It offers light,
but every light casts a shadow
we cannot turn off.
Then comes the moment
that breaks something inside us.
An ageing mother repeats the same question twice,
her memory trembling in her voice,
while her phone remembers everything she forgets:
every date, every message, every reminder.
All held perfectly,
while her mind lets go.
The room grows silent,
but the ache stays.
A child nearby laughs,
holding a small mirror up to the sun,
watching the reflection dance across courtyard walls.
For a moment, the world bends
to their hope alone.
We remember how fragile,
how fleeting,
how beautiful this unobserved life can be.
And yet, sometimes,
a private message arrives,
misread, exposed, misunderstood.
A laugh becomes accusation.
A secret becomes a record.
Even in these moments,
we learn what it means to guard ourselves,
while quietly losing ourselves.
This is the turning point,
where truth stops moving.
We lose memory,
but technology does not.
We forget our childhood,
but our devices recall our errors.
We grow older,
but our data remains timeless.
We walk forward,
but our past follows softly
like shadows stretching at dusk,
like sand shifting through a sunlit hourglass.
What is personal now?
A thought?
A breath?
A heartbeat?
Even those feel borrowed
in a world where every gesture
leaves an echo we cannot erase.
Reality shows once lived on our TVs.
We watched from a safe distance,
untouched and unseen.
But now our lives feel like their scripts,
observed, paused, replayed,
as if belonging to anyone
who knows how to look.
We are seen,
yet unseen.
Protected,
yet tethered.
We guard ourselves,
and quietly,
we lose ourselves.
A life fully observed
is a life half-lived.
Still, we walk willingly
through the glass corridors
of our own making,
unsure which reflections are ours
and which belong to a world
that judges before it understands.
Yet nothing remembers us
the way another human soul does.
Not the screens,
not the servers,
not the flawless archives.
Only a heartbeat across the room,
only a voice calling our name
with love instead of precision,
keeps the truth of who we are alive.
Sometimes, we shut the devices off,
step outside,
feel the wind on our faces,
the scent of wet soil,
the warmth of sunlight on skin,
and let the world imprint its own memory on us.
A small rebellion,
but ours.
And here, in this delicate space,
we remember something brave.
Even when the world watches,
we can choose how deeply we feel,
how softly we walk,
how fiercely we protect
the trembling pieces of ourselves
that no eye can steal.
At the end of the day,
when the screens dim
and the hum fades,
we remain human,
imperfect,
beautiful,
trying.
In a world built of light and observation,
we place one hand on our heart
and one on the unseen glass around us
and choose to live.
We walk forward
through memory and forgetting,
through fear and truth,
through silence and revelation.
And like a single candle burning
in a room of watching eyes,
we shine
as an unquenchable flame the world cannot consume,
a quiet defiance no gaze can shadow.
These are the spaces
we call our own.
– Dr Haroon Rashid
