Raffay Writes

I express my sunshine & sorrows through words for the sole purpose of others finding a home in them.

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  • Raised By Women

    my friend tells me
    that I am all
    one could ask for

    so I tell her about an irony
    of how I was loved into me
    and raised into a man
    by all the women
    who loved me right
    and the ones
    I did not

    that I was seventeen
    when my best-friend
    wanted to take her life

    that she told me her heart was blue
    and I forgot to tell her
    seventy percent of the world
    was the same as her

    and that I
    would bring her every shade of blue
    if that meant her knowing
    she was one of them
    and all of me

    that the last time i saw my mother
    she was proud and crying
    and for a brief moment
    when I looked at her face
    the airport was silent
    as if the world had lost it’s noise
    or I, the ability to hear
    that either way
    things have stayed rather silent since

    so I told my friend today
    that I was only
    all the women I had loved
    that I was only
    my mother’s son

  • Home & Privilege

    back home,
    my mother makes one less roti
    but cries a few extra tears
    as she finds it troubling
    to have one less soul in the house now

    but then she recalls
    a good-bye at the airport,
    and a promise to come back every year
    the fresh loss
    of a presence, and a laugh,
    and somewhere in between
    she gives birth
    to grief

    here,
    I long for home
    as I make my own chai
    which i know won’t be as perfect as yours
    and name my grief
    “mother”

    and as the kids go home on break
    and I lay on my chest
    longing for mine,
    I remind myself
    what a privilege it is
    to have a home to long for