Lines We Inherit
written by: Monika Ajay Kaul
Lines have a way of outrunning meaning.
A child casts them without asking why!
Across paper,
across walls,
across a day that has not yet learned to end.
Later, the same lines return
as margins, borders, signatures.
We learn to stay within the frame.
A horizon is only a line until you try to cross it.
A pulse is only a line until it falters.
A face gathers its years in fine, deliberate strokes.
An atlas of everywhere the spirit has been.
We stand
in queues, in boundaries, in definitions.
We inherit lines we did not draw.
Maps that divide,
rules that measure,
limits that introduce themselves as protection and end up as habit.
And yet
a single line can also become a path.
A contour that makes form possible.
A thread that pulls two distant points into a single current.
Fate, they say, writes in lines on the palm.
But even there, they intersect, hesitate, blur.
As if unsure of their own verdict.
Perhaps that is the feral defiance of it:
no line ever truly remains alone.
It swerves, tangles, takes the strain;
trading its isolation for a common course.
So we live between them.
Crossing, erasing, redrawing,
sometimes obeying,
sometimes stepping just outside;
where the line thins enough
to let a life slip through.
- Lines We Inherit - June 29, 2026
- Star Gazers - March 4, 2026
- The Measure of Redolence - November 21, 2025
