You have left

And i stopped
mumbling prayers.
And still,
I lit incense for the absence.
Still, I called it god.
What else do we worship
but what won’t stay?
My body became a reliquary
for the things he forgot—
his laugh,
a throatful of ash,
his name,
now just a shape 
my teeth remember.
I wrote psalms on my ribcage
with a stolen pen.
They smudged when 
I prayed too hard.
Forgive me—
I mistook hunger 
for holiness again.
Once,
I dreamed of him underwater,
his mouth full of salt,
still trying to say my name.
Even the sea
refused to carry it.
Is that not love?
To keep dying
in someone else’s storm
and call it music?
Even the gods,
those tired archivists of longing,
have begun erasing
our file.
So I sit here,
sipping my shame 
from a chipped glass,
and whispering into the dust:
come back.
not because I need you.
But because the silence
has started to answer.
And what is silence,
if not God
turning away slowly?
What is a body
but a failed temple
where no one arrives
except ghosts and mosquitoes?
I burned my diary last spring
to see if smoke could carry
what memory couldn’t.
All it did was choke
my plants.
They never flowered again.
I called that justice.
I called that healing.
Some nights,
I press my ear to the floor
and listen for the hymns
of things buried too shallow.
A dead insect.
A prayer half-said.
His “I miss you”
still warm
on the tiles.
Don’t ask me why I keep his toothbrush.
Why I speak to mirrors.
Why I carry his shirt
like scripture.
I am a church without a roof.
All rain. No thunder.
Just soaking.
I once thought grief had teeth.
Turns out—
it has wrists,
it types emails,
it answers calls,
it knows my schedule.
I am tired of metaphors.
I want him.
Untransformed.
Alive.
Laughing
at nothing on my terrace
like he used to.
But he won’t come.
So I drink his echo instead.
Sip by sip.
Until my blood
remembers
how to forget.
And when I die—
no trumpet, no blaze—
just make sure
no one folds my name
into his mouth
like a dare.
I was here.
That’s enough.
Or maybe not.
But it’s what I’ve got.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 I am yearning for death.  Forever longing for it...achingly..When people around me crave to live, do everything to have a life, I could never understand it. I could never understand the meaning of their desire. I always wanted to die… slowly, painlessly, and alone. Over time, my death instinct  became an inexorable habitual thought. The yearning to merge into an infinite darkness is there, always. The swelling torment I can't put into words. There was nothing, until him, that could dilute my urge to die. I used to think I can hold on a little, until he disappeared. I was obsessed to wither completely.  Look at me now. I think I have died, when he left. What a metaphor, the old cliché, you may think. I can declare this without embarrassment, but I can't express it. It is really so heavy to be afforded by my vocabulary, thoughts, and consciousness... Many moons ago, I listened passively to Nee Mattume by T.M. Krishna. And yesterday night, like a little miracle, it ca...
Read more

THE BOOK OF SETHI

PROLOGUE: THE FIRST TIME GRIEF SANG I don’t remember the first time I heard Ali Sethi. I remember what I lost when I did. Something inside me— the part that kept sorrow folded beneath my tongue— opened its eyes. It wasn’t music. It was recognition. A voice that didn’t arrive like thunder, but like memory—slow, precise, mercifully cruel. It sang in the key of ache I inherited but never named. This is not about songs. It’s about the ruins they left glowing. It begins, always, with silence. And then: Ali. 1 TO THE VOICE THAT ARRIVED BEFORE STORM Some nights, I don’t know if it’s rain, or your voice pressing its forehead against my window. Ali, you don’t sing— you stitch. Each word, a needle pulling centuries through my skin. I keep your ragas in my wrists— they flutter when grief walks in, asking for tea and permission to stay. Who gave you the right to know what longing sounds like before I could name it? Who taught your throat to echo the ache I buried beneath my mother tongue? Sometime...
Read more

The Unanswered Ring: Returning to Decision to Leave

Some films don’t scream.They breathe. Softly. Like someone lying next to you who doesn’t dare touch you. “Decision to Leave” wasn’t a thriller to me. It was a letter never sent.A wave that crashed but never reached the shore. I watched Seo-rae fold her silences like laundry. Every movement quiet, every word a disguise. And yet—every glance, a plea: “See me. Even if you don’t believe me.” And Hae-jun— he didn’t fall from a mountain.He dissolved, little by little, like a man walking into the sea,telling himself it’s just water. The film didn’t ask me to watch. It asked me to listen. To sighs. To footsteps. To hunger that never became desire.What kind of love is this? One that doesn’t kiss, but watches.Doesn’t hold, but follows from a distance. Doesn’t beg, but leaves quietly, hoping to be remembered...The kind that hides in plain sight. The kind that tells you,“You’re better off without me,” but still checks if you’ve eaten... A Scene I’ll Never Forget: (And perhaps, never forgive) Seo-r...
Read more