Mehwish Tayyab - An Open Letter from Breathless Heart
An Open Letter from Breathless Heart
As I sit at the table and think,
Have I lost myself in a blink?
What should I write
To rest my heart in a sleepless night?
To begin with an empty page,
Releasing thoughts from the mind's cage,
As I sit and think,
How to pour the ink.
The moment the coffee spilled,
It left the pages stained and filled.
All the pages with the coffee stain
Narrate the tale of a human stain.
For the heart has its own art,
To rejoice in silence or fall apart.
I wrote what my heart kept conveying,
A recurring Vladimir's saying:
"Today I can't write anything except my longing for you."
From the Press:
In An Open Letter from Breathless Heart, Tayyab writes with a quiet intimacy on the sense of someone pausing in the middle of an ordinary moment and realizing how much of themselves still moves toward another. The poem doesn't rush or reach; it sits with the truth that longing can be as steady and familiar as breathing. She writes from that gentle space where affection lingers through the day to day.
The use of metaphor leaves an imprint — like love leaves one without trying. It's the way another person settles into your thoughts, your routines, your private rituals, marking the page of your life in ways that feel accidental and inevitable at the same time.
Ending the piece with Nabokov's line opens the emotional world fully. "Today I can't write anything except my longing for you" isn't a cry of ache, but a confession of devotion — the kind that makes even the act of writing feel like an extension of love. Framed in this light, the poem reads as a gentle offering: an acknowledgement that yearning can be soft, steady, and profoundly human, carrying us back to the people who have shaped us in ways both spoken and unstated.
About the Author:
Mehwish Tayyab is a visual artist and writer who loves the idea of immortalizing people and moments through writing. With her diverse background in literature and arts, she loves writing poems and stories that come straight from the heart. She is currently teaching literature at a university and has also taught at a film school, where she shared her love for literature, storytelling, and creative expression. For her, vulnerability is what makes her a writer!
Additional work can be found on Spillwords Press, and on her Instagram profile: themuse_art_
