Often waiting for you in stillness is far better than searching for you in empty crowds.
When I’m in my own head in the midst of a horrendous road-traffic and you’re trying to retrace your steps to where you left me,
The garden statues watch over us with ghost-filled eyes and too many sins to shroud.
What once flourished with patches of blush peonies and gardenias now reeks of mildew, as rotten and defiled as it could be.
Your versions were one too many for me and I guess that was your last call.
You left irrevocably and completely and with as much faith I can pull off, I can say I have never been better since then.
Your presence switched from soulful to stifling without notice and even laying eyes on you seemed too far-fetched a hope to haul.
The repeat of a full circle of one step forward and three steps back and crying myself to sleep while your indifference gets the best of you- I’m jaded by resisting again and again.
I’m piqued by urging myself to write the love poems that I so very well couldn’t divulge my heart into;
I’m piqued by perpetually mulling over the words you spoke so heedlessly and ignorantly.
So, if earphones plugged in my phone can help me turn a deaf ear to reminders of your presence, then so be it; I’ll be as good as I can be with no conversations with you to pursue,
And if that makes me a burden or a bother then I’m fine with that too; If that means I can’t move on simply then I’d gratefully resort to doing so belligerently.
It’s like I spilled coffee over my favourite shirt and for a moment that seemed like the end of the world.
No matter how much I rinse it, the stain won’t come off. But, soon enough accepting the irrevocable can spark moments of a different kind of joy.
Though the stain of your damage on me still remains, I get oblivious day by day with my contentment well furled.
As I sink into my own headspace I can finally, truly breathe; breathe away from all that time you took me for a decoy.
It’s not the blush peonies or gardenias anymore but, fresh acacias and marigolds for I’m now a work in progress and an endeavour for renewal.
It’s bliss but in a better form that does not vividly promise pain in kaleidoscopic flashes.
It’s not an ecstatic taste of love in a moment and prosaic gazes out the window in the next with no hope to fuel.
The further crumpled part of me still lives on but I’m not anymore the girl who would heed to your half-heartedness, bashfully batting her eyelashes.
I hate cliches now but I am in fact waking up and rising wholly and potently from the ashes.
(Your memories still perceptibly inflict vile gashes.)
~ Riddhi Chakraborty
Notes: This poem actually stabs me to death; I can clearly remember being in absolute pieces while writing this; it’s personal to a great extent.
Swan's Labyrinth 