Poetry blooms from the wreckage beneath my skin

Rupali Jeganathan, 25 // One half poetry. Buy me a coffee at: www.buymeacoffee.com/missbookthief/.

[whisperinglillies]

As the dawn breaks over the horizon we run towards our home, exhilarated and out of breath, with the night still singing in our throats. You tug at my sleeve and sit on a broken tree stump trying to catch your breath and I tease you by asking if all the tiredness of chasing the seagull who stole your ice cream is finally hitting you. You flick my nose, your body filling with laughter till mine joins in and we laugh and laugh as the sun paints us in orange pastels and we laugh and laugh like the Universe is just a big old joke and we laugh and laugh till I can hear nothing but your cackles mixed with mine, the both of us sounding like a guitar offkey, and I think to myself: "maybe this is what the Universe sounds like when I'm happy."

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) // Happy Buy me a coffee!

[whisperinglillies]

She tries to tell me how she feels. She pushes and prods against the edges of language, trying to grasp words that could possibly contain the multitudes of grief inside her. But language always falls short. No sentence in any language comes close to describing her pain. Finally, she bursts out of the confines of language. Like someone finally breaking the surface of the water and gasping for breath after almost drowning. And she howls, and howls, till her hungs are empty of air. She creates a new language for her grief. And without the barrier of words between us, I tell her that I finally understand.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

Lavender is associated with my favorite memory of you. On our first date, you took me to a lavender field where we could pick our own lavender in baskets. This is my favorite place on earth, you told me with a big grin, because lavender is the happiest colour. I had never thought of associating lavender with happiness, it had always been yellow for me. You turned my sun purple that day. Suddenly, I began to see everything in lilacs and violets.

After you were gone, I couldn't smell lavender without crying. I threw away every purple thing in the house. Your name was a cotton ball in my throat that I could neither swallow nor spit out. It was as if someone had taken a spoon and scooped out the flesh of the sun, leaving only the edges; a purple ring, stacked with your name. I'm standing at your grave, with a basketful of lavenders I picked from your favorite place, and as I plant them all around your tombstone, a purple streak slowly burns through the sky. We loved with a love so loud it could fill a whole room. Now, the rest of my life must be lived in silence.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) • Lavender

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[whisperinglillies]

// In a language that doesn't have the word love //

(After Caitlin Conlon)

In a language that doesn't have the word love / I say, your hand fits mine / I say, I will take care of your pet turtle while you're away, even though I'm terrified of turtles / I say, you are the only one who can calm the beating drums of my heart / I say, your smile is enough to make me believe in God / I say, every prayer of mine comes out sounding like your name / I say, I will know you by smell alone. I will know you even in death, at the end of the world / I say, my life is no good without you / I say, I picked some wildflowers on the way home because they reminded me of you / I show you the comic about the poison dart frog who could not kiss anybody because everything he touched died / I say, I would let you kiss me anyway / I say, I finally understand the man who crossed an entire country on foot just to see the face of his beloved one more time / I say, for the first time in my life, I look forward to the future, and I mean it.

-Rupali Jeganathan | @whisperinglillies

The comic is Frogmic: Poison Love by @tomatotoro on Instagram. The lines "I will know you by smell alone, I will know you even in death, at the end of the world" are from A Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller.

[whisperinglillies]

Love is stored in the way your hands always seek mine / threading our fingers together / as if they were two lovers who could not bear to be apart for too long. / Love is stored in the segments of orange that you feed me / while we sit at the beach / counting the boats on the horizon. / Love is stored in the way we lean into each other, unthinkingly, like two inverted commas / seeking each other's warmth. / Love is stored in the gentle way I hold your name in my mouth. / Love is stored in the goofy notes we write each other on paper napkins, and love is stored in the tiny details you remember about me, and love is stored in every "I saw this and thought of you," and every "I read the book you recommended," and every "I wish you were here." / There is love - an abundance of it - in the way we take care of each other, and in this love, there is tenderness.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) • Tenderness

[whisperinglillies]

It has been a while since words have come to me. The same words that used to reside underneath my fingernails like dirt. Words, that would settle themselves on my fingertips on nights when sleep was being elusive, and wrap themselves around me like a warm blanket when the winter in my bones would freeze my heart.

Words, I have searched for you in the rhythm of the gentle swaying of the treetops, and inside the pockets of my unwashed denims. I have tried to taste your flavour in the tiny raindrops that I catch from the sky, and looked for you in the limpid blue eyes of the stranger who sat next to me on the bus.

I have tried to unlock you from the vault of memories I keep buried deep inside my heart, and spent many a sleepless night cursing you for leaving me abandoned in this dark alleyway, with no way to find my way home.

Sometimes, I find strays hidden along with the dust, under my bed. Bits and pieces sticking to my little toe. I try to shake you off and lock you shut deep inside a poem, but the fragmented pieces of the unfinished poem swirl in the air around me and laugh at me, mockingly.

And, after millions of seconds of searching for you, I finally found you, in the absence left behind by a human.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

A poem has been brewing inside my chest all day it waits on the tip of my tongue. I kiss it onto your skin as soon as you arrive home. You smile, shyly, even after all these years a light blush staining your cheeks and my body feels filled with light as if I have been munching on sunbeams all day. This- our soft life, this- our house built of dreams where the lavender curtains rustle in the wind creating gentle music, this- a house filled with laughter is enough.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) ~ Our Soft Life

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[whisperinglillies]

Dear Sal, in this tiny rectangle I have packaged my heart and I hope you can unwrap it and run your finger lightly over the chambers and watch it tremble for you. Yesterday, I saw a dragonfly wing up close for the first time and it looked like pieces of glass stuck together and I thought about how you are the only one who would appreciate the poetry of it. Sal, I miss you. The tiny cottage I'm living in aches for your presence. I'm counting down the days till we can meet again. Till then, wear my heart on a necklace around your neck. I will send word about my arrival soon. Love, Matthew.

Photo: via Unsplash

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

Even the sky fell in love with your eyes so much, that she curled up and stayed inside them.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

[whisperinglillies]

I ask you if you love me and in the two seconds it takes you to answer I watch a city die in your eyes, its lights slowly flickering before going out like the electricity packing its bags and leaving town just before a storm to calmer places where the idea of being in love with a category I hurricane doesn't look quite so scary.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) 

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[whisperinglillies]

My mother never believed in God. She would always tell me that holiness lay in the mundane, in the most ordinary moments of life; the ones that we don't even register as they pass us by. Yet, when we look back, they are the ones we miss the most. Like your laughter swinging in an arc around the playground as you go high, high, higher, before you jump, landing with a soft thud on the sand. Like the whistle the wind makes as it races past your ears, a sound so filled with joy that you can feel your heart grow three sizes bigger. Like the love that is filled in the moment when you bring an umbrella for me because the weather app predicted rain and you knew I would forget to bring one despite hating the rain. Like the satisfaction of going out of your way to step on dried leaves just to hear them crunch.

Did you know there is a word for it? It is called psithurism. It's amazing, isn't it? How you can find a word for pretty much everything, in one language or the other. Often, I think about the time we were both sitting on a park bench- me, reading a book, and you, listening to that podcast that you loved, the one about the supernatural murders. You were peeling an orange, and you absent-mindedly handed half of it to me. I was struck by this nonchalant gesture of love. The way you didn't even think twice about offering half of your orange to me. Like it was a given that you would. Since then, I have searched in numerous languages, but no word has ever come close to describing how I felt in that moment. But I do know that this is the kind of moment my mother talked about. I do not have a name for it, and I doubt I ever will. But I do know that it is some type of holy.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) • Some Type Of Holy

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[whisperinglillies]

At the end of the world there were just our hands reaching out to each other starting a small war of their own in the untouched space between them, a lament threading itself between humming with the promise that we would find each other again no matter how long it took, that we would travel through space and time just to hold each other's hand again, that even the end of the world was not enough to keep us apart.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) 

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[whisperinglillies]

I have b   r    o      k    e n apart in front of the moon so many times, and each time she has put my pieces back together painstakingly. Sometimes the pieces don't always fit perfectly together, a miniscule piece of me lost forever to the wind. When that happens she dips her fingers into the sky and fills in the cracks with the vibrant colours of a sunset like an artist making sure his painting is done perfectly. Where do all the colours come from, I asked her once for it is always midnight when the moon comes out to talk to me. Oh honey, she says, the colours are always there. They're just hidden by the midnight cloak for a while. Just like you, she says. Just like you.

 -Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

How much do words weigh, you ask me. So, I decide to conduct an experiment. I take a lime green page out of your favorite notebook, and write about our favorite Uncle. I write about our yearly ritual of licking ice cream while on the ferris wheel, and trying not to let it drip. I write about how one time he dropped the ice cream cone and it fell on someone's head, and how we laughed and laughed that day. I don't write about all the times we'll never get to go on the ferris wheel with him, though. Those unwritten words hide in the margins, and in the spaces between the lines. They make the page bleed. I rip the words out of the page and throw them towards the sky. They wither away like clouds. They vanish like dandelion wings. But my fingers still remember them. My heart is weighed down by these words. So, I look to you and say. These words are weightless. These words carry the weight of the world.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies) • Weightless

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[whisperinglillies]

I am not bones / plastered with honey skin /the colour of my mother's chai. / I am just an ache / filled with the quiet of funerals, / the belly of a poem, / a storm with skin. / I am just a moment, / I am eternity.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

I kissed you

with sunshine on my lips,

and

watched you burst

into flowers.

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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[whisperinglillies]

What colour is love to you, you asked me once when we were waiting for the last train at the subway station. Love is the colour of your skin, I thought. But the words grew roots in my throat. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't manage to get them out. Because we were best friends, and best friends aren't supposed to say things like that to each other.

I wore that question around my neck for days like a scarf. I searched in ten shops, till I found a glass jar painted with the exact shade of your skin. I filled it with some wildflowers I found on the way home, and attached a note to it. "Love is the colour of your hand in mine." And when I saw the smile on your face as I gave it to you, I thought, "my god, if a blind man ever asks me what a sun rising looks like, I will tell him that this.. this is what it looks like."

-Rupali Jeganathan (@whisperinglillies)

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