Aditi

Oct 2020

Mikaila

I don't want you to miss me
Like an arm or a lung.
I would miss you like that
If you hated me, if you were gone,
And maybe you'd feel
The same.
But away as you are
Reluctantly,
Briefly,
In love and in faith,
I hope you miss me smaller,
Lighter,
Warmer.
I want missing me to go with you wherever you are
Not like a raincloud or a looming shadow
But like
Like a small love note
A little slip of paper, almost inconsequential,
Something you see and smile and think,
"I'll keep this."
Something you fold up small and slide into the bottom of your coat pocket
And fiddle with whenever you're bored or lonely
And maybe sometimes you forget it, maybe it doesn't always catch your notice
But then the wind blows and in the cold you push your hands
Deep into those pockets
And your fingers brush the thought of me and how I love you
And a smile spreads across your face.
Maybe you take it out and look it over,
And then decide to put it back so that can happen
All over again.
I want you to miss me like that.
I want it to be something sweet and small, something that can travel with you
And never weigh you down.
It's true that I think of you whenever I am sat in silence for more than a moment
And I do the same sort of thing
Maybe too often, maybe too fondly.
Maybe my little love note would be creased and worn
And rubbed a little blurry from the pads of my fingers tracing your words.
But nonetheless
You are so easy to take along with me
The thought of you so warm and comforting and
Light
But strong.
I want that for you.
I want to be easy to hold
So that maybe you will never
Let me go.

#love #distance

Aditi Apr 2019

Afterglow.

You smile-
And it's like a thousand suns-
Breaking through the clouds,
Like somewhere inside
An eclipse came undone.
Like slowly, but surely,
All the oceans in my lungs
Evaporated
And the sky rushed
To take its stead;
An unsaid prayer being answered.

Your fingers-
They leave a trail
Of goosebumps
Down my neck.
Oh, what a tease!
First ruffle my hair
And tuck at the heartstrings
Only to wrap them again,
Under your fist;
The only order, I'll obey.

Your lap-
Never I thought,
Love could be a landscape.
Or how being crouched
To fit all of me
Into one space
To be held by you -
Would put my spine at ease,
Or your heart will conspire
And beat all these stale
Clichés into my ears;
A welcome isolation.

Groaning up,
I wake,
In a dim room
With your phantom, fleeing presence.
Same teasing smile,
Same chaste eyes
And same flesh
But though he had your face,
He was not you-
Just a projection
Of my brain
To put my aching heart
To rest

#dreams #phantom #you #love #ache #lost

Aditi Jan 2019

You're not coming, are you?

I bleed in silence, in
Abandoned cathedrals,
Monasteries, and holy Shrines.
I have looked for you,
Begged the grand idols,
Visited crumbling walls
Of burnt out cities,
And antiquities -
All the places they told me
You had been.

My eyes see red
But I'm blue,
And there's a bruise
On my knee-
A blend of both.
My lips no longer move in prayers
My eyes have no tales to tell-
But my poems scream
And I live - on a middle ground
Between the two
-a whimper on nights,
A sad smile during days.

You're not coming for the rescue, are you?

I ache and long, now
More than I can love
But for what? Is it you?
I never could commit suicide,
But I killed myself, every moment,
nonetheless,
Till I heard the rhythm of that heavenly call
In your footsteps
And how you filled even the silences between us
With grace
And I was seen, and I could see
And I was loved with a love
That I could accept.

If our love had two colors,
It'd be red and blue
Like any God,
You came with your own set of rules.
Passionate red, that you brought
And the blues that I always carry
Red and blue icy veins -
With the same emotions flowing through.
But you were taken away too.
And now I'm neither red, nor blue
But despondent brown
The color of the dirt, the only thing
Separating me and you.

You're not coming back, are you?

I walk on,
I don't rest and I don't sleep.
How can there be a God if there's no justice?
And the moon is not blue with sadness;
Nor does it cry with me.
And the stars are just as oblivious and distant.
And the sun, well, it never bothered
to shine on any of us.
I see a world now, as it is,
Stripped of meaning
and all its metaphorical use.

If I could be colored,
I'd choose red and blue-
Burning bright
with a frigid determination.
To save the soul,
Sometimes you must
destroy its vessel
And when a world dies, its gods must die along.

None of you came, so I had to come to you.

#god #agnostic #death #red #blue #cathedrals #shrine #vessels #suicide

Aditi Dec 2018

I feel sad pls validate me

Sun dissolves
into swirls of hues
All over the sky.
This twilight, I realised
How I feel partly like funerals
And partly like a sunrise
Love child of a story
-Of too soon
And too late.
Maybe I should write a manual
On me, for myself.

Darkness hesitates
At my doorstep-
As if reminding itself
That it has got nothing to lose
But then again,
It is not like I have anything it could take.
So we sit in silence- an impasse
Till darkness becomes me
And its, I become.

Sunlight dances
Upon me-
Shattered all over the floor.
Let's see who wins
This tug of war
My brain -
Or my heart?
As I sit there- casualty of a war
I never did start.

So I break
Every shimmering surface
Of windows, and mirrors In my house
And ducttape the ones
I can't.
Why do they reflect all this light
When not an ounce,
I can soak
I know who I'm
(or do I?)
Can they show me
What I want?
(and how to get there?)

#death #is #the #answer

Aditi Dec 2018

Pls don't forget me

I may be the monster chasing you in your sleep, now, or all the sea shells that you collected as a kid and eventually lost. I may be just another blurred face in your dreams, or, the first touch of sunlight knocking at your windowpane. Or maybe, I'm just a dusty album thrown carelessly up in your attic- not useless enough to be dismissed, but useless enough for you to no longer know what to do with me. (Or I'm just a jammed door whose key you still keep with you in your pocket, your footsteps halt in front of me once in a while, but the moment passes and so do you)

Or, maybe 10 years from now, in your mind and heart, I no longer register at all.

You and I, we are the children of the same paradox. A fragile thread hung above a horizon-less sea. Could we get what we wanted while being who we are? Do I not belong as much to the thing i left behind as I do to the future that I'm seeking? How to acknowledge your hurt without having to apologize for who I am? Can I ever find home if my heart is always curious about what's beyond? How could it have been love if I had to keep breaking pieces of myself to make some accommodations for you? Why, after all this time, it still feels like it was? Could you really find love in the arms where you lost yourself?

And this is what you're to me. 5 years from then, you're still the headache I get at 2 am and the bloodshot eyes. The thought processes running in circle. You're the human embodiment of my life-i could create something with you, something out of you but I let the idea of it consume me. And sitting underneath the ocean, before oblivion hits me, I imagine asking to your fractured reflection- have you ever wanted to be the universe - something so grand- that you settled down in this abyss- and became nothing.

Aditi Jan 2018

Petals

My petals were withering,
The butterflies turned into wasps.
An oppressive silence-
Weighing down on my conscience
And the fingertips - used to drawing sunrises
-compelled to write eulogies instead.
Of Chapped lips and vacant eyes.
And how the autumn had caught up to us.

And I remembered,
With an aching guilt-
How I had not even played in the rain,
Not much, not at all.

My words had rusted,
My voice- cracked, and unfamiliar
Even to my own ears.
The summer long poems that I wrote in love
Were set ablaze,
To help me survive a winter
without you.
Oh, when I said our love would keep us warm
This is not exactly how i had it planned.

And you did not get to read even a word.
One always thinks they have time.
But we did not.
Not then, and definitely not now.

As a child, I grew up wanting a lot from myself
-even the world, if I were to be honest.
Somewhere along the line,
All I wanted was for this all to not hurt.
And somehow the polar opposites are more alike
Than I'd have thought.
'Cause you see, people who want a bit of everything
Are very close to wanting nothing in particular, not much.

And I wish I had learnt to differentiate
Of when to sharpen my sword and when to use my pen
Cause now I'm down to my last petal
And all you have is a blue splotch on your shirt.

Aditi Oct 2017

Boy pt 1

To the boy who makes my skin feel like home again,
You held out your hand and stood there patiently while I warily placed my hand in yours and maybe incidentally some part of my heart too. You so gently removed his imprints off me that I did not even notice till I was standing in front of my mirror, glowing, no longer looking away from my reflection but smiling back at it. Thank you. Thank you for having the thoughtfulness to wipe your fingerprints off before leaving too. You know I never could understand how people use standing alone in the rain as a metaphor for sadness, it's not. It's liberating. And that's how I feel about you. You were the drizzle that set me free.

To the boy who does not make butterflies somersault in my veins,
You were smirking at something clever you said at my expanse and I was looking back at you calmly not the least bothered by the slight blush crawling up to my cheeks. Because that's what you were to me. My anchor. My calmness. My life jacket. Thank you for teaching me that most hurricanes and people are only looking for ways to self destruct and I need not be the one to put myself in their ways in hopes to save them when I myself have been drowning. Thank you for handing me back the anchor. Now I carry it with me and toss it down whenever I feel the flow is too strong for me. You loved me enough to make me love myself, but not enough for me to be yours more than I was mine. I don't know why they don't teach about self love or how we owe ourselves some kindness too. But you did. I have not been this shade of love in a long while and I don't ever want to be anything else.

To the boy who makes me smile when I'm with him but does not steal it away when he is gone,
You make me feel things in slow motion like the way a tortoise comes out of its shell, like the blooming of a bud, like a letter hidden among the pages of a history book no one is ever going to bother to read and all the other soft things. Thank you. I'm the love in all those soft things. I've the love i need the most. And so I smile. And I write myself poetry just as much as I write for you. I dance alone when you're gone just as enthusiastically as I do when I'm standing on your feet. I don't understand how I could have ever thought that love was love only when you loved with all the parts of you; saving none for yourselves cause it's not. Love is taking care of yourself and being the sun to your universe but letting him know he is the constellation who you love to read and embrace every night before you fall asleep. Love is hand you want to hold while you're reigning your life.

To the boy who kept his distance while I sulked on the floor but became my backbone when I was teaching myself how to walk,
You told me you fall apart and you think you're done but that's when the work begins. I realised how you don't need people when you're down as much as you do when you're trying to get up after falling down a time too many to count. But you were there. And i needed to understand that not every fragility was breakable. Some relented and preserved. And it's not about how long you stay on the floor but with how much fervor you stand back, again and again after being kicked. Thank you. I'm going to carry my fragile heart like a crown shielded by logic. It's okay to be brilliant and kind. You don't have to rust your shine cause you're blinding someone.

To the boy who makes my skin feel like home again, to the boy who does not make butterflies somersault in my veins, to the boy who makes Me smile when I'm with him but does not steal it away when he is gone, to the boy who was there holding me up when I was trying to be more than I have ever been before

Thank you. ❤

Would it be weird if I told you I wanted to change the boy part to girl and make it about me cause honestly I have been a great best friend to myself for all these years And I taught myself these stuffs so yaay go me