I Was Never Alone Poem by Mystic Qalandar

As I try to enter stillness,
my soul remembers
what the mind has buried.

Silence becomes
a threshold—
one I never asked to cross.

I close my eyes and pray
not to awaken
inside the labyrinth of myself.

Yet bubbles rise
from the mind's dark marsh,
each one carrying
a fragment of what I fought to forget.

They break upon the surface
of sleep
and drag me back
toward the chambers
I had sealed.

Rest is no longer rest.
Sleep becomes
another name
for the nightmare.

In the half-lit country of dreaming,
I awaken unable to move—
my scream buried
somewhere beneath the ribs.

Something vast
sits upon my chest.

Terror enters
through every door of the heart,
occupying each chamber
as though it has always lived there.

I know I am awake.
And yet the brain,
that faithless gatekeeper,
refuses to believe me.

I plead with my limbs
to return.

I plead with the heart
to become flesh again,
to remember
the world of breath and blood.

At last, the weight withdraws.

The prison opens.

But I awaken
into a dreamless state—
a naked consciousness
suspended between worlds.

I long for a stillness
in which memory
cannot become a predator;

for a silence
deep enough to receive me
without turning its face away.

I want to fall asleep
beside my True Self—
the hidden witness
who does not sleep,
the flame beneath the ashes,
the secret presence
that makes the darkness harmless.

Let that awakened Self
breathe through me.

Let its breath remind
the wandering mind:

I am here—
not there.

Let the guardians
of my inward sanctuary
stand beside me
when the old nightmares
crawl back through
the cracks of memory.

Let them place their hands
upon the gates of the soul
and say:

Nothing that rises from the dark
is greater than the light
that beholds it.

Then may I remain awake
within the silence of my being—
not fleeing the night,
not bargaining with fear,
but listening
for the presence
that has never left.

And when morning opens
its first hidden eye,
may I awaken knowing:

I was never alone.

The one who trembled
was held.

The one who wandered
was witnessed.

The one who descended
was guided—

by the unseen Self
that waited patiently
at the centre of the dark.

—MyKoul