Dreamscapes of Her

My phone buzzed with a hundred missed calls and messages that day.

The sink was rancid with the scent of a heap of dirty, unwashed dishes lying in disarray,

A slender bolt of light peeked through the fridge illuminating the dark kitchen, slightly.

A wood cutting board with partly diced tomatoes and a chef’s knife on the kitchen counter, spurned, lay.

The sticky notes affixed on the microwave read ‘I loved us’; handwriting so unsightly.

Last Christmas, i choked on the cake she made, the icing just a little too fancy, the sugar amount just a little too mild,

Tolerated enough the midnight birthday wishes and butterfly kisses on my cheeks,

The dearth of sanguinity and passion in me, I’d rather have myself banished by her or exiled.

Tolerated enough the gratuitous goodbye hugs and secret notes of love poems in tiffin boxes, finding herself no reciprocal of the affection that she seeks.

Tolerate, tolerate, tolerate, tolerate.

Transitory be as love often may, she grieved truth as I did her loss in the end.

Tainted with splattered blood of hope, the walls of this opulent chasm she called home rattled with rage,

Tables turned, but didn’t in a way; I missed my tolerance and her desperation for the lost love to mend.

She said, perhaps in another lifetime, “You kill, I kill. You die, I die.”

We aren’t equal though,

While tolerance twisted and pretzeled my soul in ghastly ways,

She let it take her life on spot with her skull cracked open and her heart covertly ablaze.

(Maybe the gift box enclosing her heart, in the kitchen was just for show then)

~ Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: Literally wrote this in like half an hour but ok