#feb fifty

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

8 // indifference

The jagged edges of your broken voice have been smoothed over with time, falling in great big dollops against the top of my head. It trickles down my back, seeping into my mottled skin, diffusing through my body a wave of self-hatred that I no longer feel.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

2 // procrastination

The five hundred and thirteen things that are left unchecked on my to-do list sit heavy on my shoulders and crumble my conscience to dust. The heaviest things on that list are the names of people who I do not recognise anymore.

How long does it take for a promise to break?

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

7 // blue

I am stuck between the white-washed walls of my childhood and the confusion that rests in the spaces between an explosion of colour. Blue is no longer the colour of sadness. It is windows and feelings and the highlights in your hair. It is the deodorant that you use on a particularly sweaty day, and the softness of your gaze on the back of my head from halfway around the world.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

12 // vulnerability

It's not easy, ripping yourself apart at the seams (no matter how drunk you happen to be) feeling the thread that you've laced over your wounds pop apart like a few thousand firecrackers

and acknowledging that existence isn't your biggest worry; that you care about more than how long each line of your poem is.

It's not easy.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

5 // morning

You wake up to the smell of last night's reheated dinner and the sound of the window pane scraping against the frame. You know you'll get out of the wrong side of bed even though there's only one side you can get out of. The books piled up beside you are sleeping more comfortably than you ever have.

You breathe in the smell of last night's reheated dinner with a sense of complacency and you can no longer hear the sound of the window pane scraping against the frame.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

1 // death

I will fly to Bombay tomorrow morning, seated between my sister and the sunrise. We will walk into that apartment; pick our way through piles of dusty Marathi books and eat parathas soaked in home-made ghee and tell each other jokes soaked in home-grown sarcasm; we will not cry.

We will not tell our cousin that her favourite uncle is dead. We will take short walks in the humid parking lot and track in dust that will settle on every surface until our vision is blurred by the white noise of our cathode ray television set that will never work again.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

11 // entropy

I fold my clothes neatly and put them away in the hope of being able to decrease my own entropy, expelling explosions of randomness out into the universe; like stepping in a pile of concrete dust on a street corner, washing your feet to rid yourself of memories that cannot be held together as one single entity.

[this-is-where-i-write-things]

10 // words

My eyelids flutter closed, sealing dead metaphors into a pit of darkness from which they can never escape. The world does not need any more weights lifted off its shoulders. The fabric of our reality has worn thin with words, wasting away precious paradigms, that now exist only as the poorly constructed playthings of someone pretending to write.