Almost

We we’re scrambling for words, building sentences from apologies. How many ways are there to say sorry. What other phrases can we stitch up before we end with goodbye?

We held on to that phone call like it was the only thing keeping our fragile little door from being locked. And as we sat there in silence, our vast oasis of vocabulary all dried up, I cannot begin to fathom how many long nights I’ll spend thinking how we could have had it differently. Maybe we could have tried. And even if we would inevitably fail, I’d like one last car ride home. No arguments, no stupid petty fights. And maybe then, I’d lock in that memory and wash out all the bad ones, just remember you in that one fleeting moment of bliss.

I forget things all the time. From birthdays to dorm keys. But with you, its like forgetting is not an option

The universe just placed us there- in that place, at that exact time.

The rest, was us.

Writing you out of my system, one poem at a time

Make it stop

I awake to the mistakes that haunt me in my sleep. All the screwed-up do overs hold me hostage in bed as I clench the blankets close. I think, if I could suffocate myself in this darkness and never wake up, I’d thank the universe for the free pass.

I have never gotten a free pass on missing you. I had to savor the senseless ache of my of this cosmic joke that is me. I wish I could let you go. You are, after all, just a distant history. A vivid wish. A senseless longing for attention, an aching desperation for touch.

I have known all too well this kind of pain. The type that aches slowly, rises and falls, hits you again just when you think it’s gone.

I stop and look back, was it worth it?

Burning house

What hurts about it all is that I cannot muster the elegance to write about you.

No matter how hard I try I cannot stitch up the right words to describe what I feel

Somehow I always end up with the same cliche metaphors of drowning. Of being pulled down by the crushing weight of the ocean. It has always been the same sinking feeling.

And I have no other words to describe it. How i always think sunsets. How the warmth of your touch was always sunsets. Nothing remotely comes close to this feeling other than the trickling orange amidst the fading blue skies. How quick and how beautiful, how each passing day with you was always the home I longed for.

How is it that even homes are meant to be fragile. How easily it burns down, and all of a sudden we are left with bruises and burns. We tried, always tried to rebuild this home with promises and hand holds. Though it was never ideal, for a long time we managed. It kept us dry from the storms and kept us sheltered from the chaos. God, I miss running away from the world in your arms.

But I have yet to realize that promises make weak foundations. Soon enough we broke apart and you let go. As much as I wanted to do the same, I felt too stuck in this burning house. I still have to learn how to free myself from the mistakes of yesterday.

Now I bury myself in unquenched feeling of missing you. I miss you, every single day. From when you left til forever.

I am stuck in this burning house.

This feeling of missing you has never been new.

Words stolen

I have not written much

Months have passed as the writer in me withers away, silenced under all the time spent back bent into question marks. It has been the most tiring mornings to wake up to.

I have not written anything in months.

Medical school has stolen the time I would savor to think of words. Now words are how much time I can afford to think. My vocabulary has since been replaced.

Before, I write about the aching pain in my chest- the unfathomable mass evolving inside, pushing against my rib cage, slowly but so surely..any minute now, I wait..for it to consume me. It only does so slowly.

Now i write about the heart and its cardiac output. We do not talk of whirlwinds inside the thoracic cage, instead we talk of stroke volumes and afterloads- pressures the heart has to overcome to pump blood. And no, we are not talking of the way he puts pressure on your heart with the way he looks at you amidst a crowd of beautiful things. Not the way he makes your heart skip a beat when he walks towards you in gentle steps, taking his time, taking the universe’s awe with each step. No. We talk about tricuspid stenosis. We talk about arterial plaques, the possibilities of embolisms, myocardial infarctions. Death.

We talk of death in anatomy. Not the way time ticks so fast with life and yet freezes at the moment of death. Not the way we write about it in suicide notes- impulsive, indecisive, incomprehensible. Instead, we dissect death. Talk about the likeliest bone to be fractured when you jump off a 10 storey building. We do not talk of the life escaping from your last breath. No. We study rigor mortis. The biochemical basis of how your body stiffens after death. The muscles refusing to relax, until lactic acid sweeps away the myosin from its cross bridge.

We talk of health in numbers. The amount of protein in the diet. The blood count. The tidal volume not the tidal waves of wrong decisions hitting you straight in the face the morning you wake up. The oxygen dissociation curve. Not like the linear pattern of how we equate our worth with number of failures.

Here we do not have time to celebrate the wins. We fixate on the failures. Think again and again. Why. How. What else.

How many more hours to sacrifice. How many more birthdays, weddings, do we need to miss to get things right. What words we need to know. What parts of us we need to shut off. What pain we have to accept.

We have to get it right. More than words we have to get it right. A life depends on it.

You

In the spectrum of the ocean’s blue

I have seen a whole different depth

And it was you

Cigarette to your lips

You still look for his