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The Season of Unasked Questions

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Priya Mehta University of Edinburgh · Scotland Published in Aporia · Issue 1 · April 2026
I have learned to hold silence the way water holds the shape of its last container — formless, yet remembering everything.
There are questions I have kept folded in the back of drawers, the ones that asked themselves at 3am and found no door to knock on.
My grandmother used to say some things grow better in the dark — mushrooms, she meant, and maybe also grief.
✦   ✦   ✦
I have been thinking about the words we rehearse in mirrors, the ones we dress in confidence before they reach another person.
How much of speaking is performance? How much of listening is waiting for your turn?
The season that taught me most was the one when I stopped asking — when I learned that uncertainty was not a failure of the mind
but its most honest weather.
A note from the author
This poem began as something I wrote in the margins of a philosophy textbook during a lecture on epistemology. The professor was talking about Socratic aporia — the productive state of not-knowing — and I kept thinking about how that felt less like a philosophical concept and more like Tuesday morning. The poem grew from that.
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About the Author Priya Mehta University of Edinburgh · Scotland

Priya Mehta is a second-year literature student at the University of Edinburgh. She writes poetry and personal essays, mostly about language, memory, and the strange geography of growing up between two countries. This is her first publication.

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