Mornings licked amber—
wet, bright—
papaya pulp split in the grass,
rain still steaming off rooftops.

they came—
sway-backed, jewel-eyed—
weaving cobalt ribbons through the cricket fields,
feathers slick as oil spills.

I waited—
barefoot, rice pinched in small fingers—
not offering—inviting.

they took—
beaks sharp,
eyes glinting like they carried whole summers behind them—
but they never left.

even when the rains came—
hard and urgent—
they stayed, hips swaying under silver sheets,
tails dragging through warm mud.

I thought they danced for me—
as if the whole monsoon belonged only to the girl watching— silent, secret-spined—
hair curling at the nape—
too small to touch,
too quiet to call them by name—
but they saw me.

I know they did.

they crowned me in silence—
Princess of Puddles,
Keeper of Small Hungers.

somewhere between the serpent hunts,
the rain-slick pirouettes—
I learned how beauty moves—
how it takes without asking,
how it lives without needing to be seen.

they were never mine—
but I belonged to them—
to the fevered mornings,
to the blue-green shimmer folded beneath heavy air,
to the secret language only wild things speak—

something wordless—
something that never leaves you.

I have nothing of you
except your face in the dark,
your voice in the silence,
your words echoing in my mind.

I have nothing of you
except your smile in sorrow,
your soul in my essence,
and you—always you—
living in every corner of my heart.

Act I: The Universe Breathes, and I Am an Afterthought

I arrived late to existence,
billions of years after the stars had their golden age.
Missed the Big Bang,
missed the Renaissance,
missed the time when love letters were written on paper,
instead of reducing feelings to keystrokes.

They handed me a body,
a mind that questions too much,
and a world obsessed with carving meaning out of chaos—
as if Sisyphus hadn’t already proven
we’re all just rolling boulders uphill,
pretending not to notice the futility.

Act II: The Weight of Knowing, the Lightness of Forgetting

Socrates said, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing.”
I read that at 3 a.m. and felt personally attacked.
Descartes told me, “I think, therefore I am,”
but some days, I think too much and forget how to be.

History is a carousel of déjà vu,
spinning the same tragedies on repeat.
Empires fall, currencies crash,
trends resurrect themselves like poorly buried ghosts.
The Greeks feared hubris,
the Romans feared the barbarians,
I fear how meaning crumbles when no one is left to remember.

Act III: Beyond Meaning, Beyond Regret

Maybe Dante was right—
hell isn’t fire, it’s bureaucracy.
Maybe we’re just modern Stoics in overpriced hoodies,
romanticizing the art of being okay with things we can’t change.

Maybe meaning isn’t found in grand gestures,
but in the quiet absurdity of it all—
in watching the sun rise like it’s not exhausted,
in laughing at a joke older than Shakespeare,
in knowing that despite wars, collapses, heartbreaks, and lost civilizations—
someone, somewhere, still bakes bread from scratch,
still hums a song they don’t remember the name of,
still chooses to keep going.

Final Scene: To Exist Is to Hesitate, and Yet—

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
I’m still figuring out my why.
But in the meantime,
I’ll sip my coffee, watch the world spin,
and pretend I was always meant to be here.

If the rain could weave your touch into mine,
I'd let it drench me, time after time.
Perhaps in a place where clocks don't turn,
You’d find me waiting, a love unlearned.

Glass-winged moths hover,
opal figs drip milky dusk,
stars hum, ripe with light.

The canvas stares back at me,
Blank, unforgiving—
A mirror of my mind,
Its emptiness a cruel reminder.
I pick up the brush with trembling hands,
But every stroke feels like betrayal,
Each color too loud, too bright,
Spilling out in chaotic bursts,
Nothing like the picture in my head.

I paint, I paint,
But nothing comes close.
The reds are too red,
The blues too cold.
Each line, each curve,
A mistake I can't undo.
And still, I push forward,
Hoping for something that feels right—
But nothing feels right.

The shadows of doubt creep in,
Dark, relentless—
They mock every attempt I make,
Every flick of the brush a ghost
That haunts the edge of the canvas.
I try to fix it,
But the more I try,
The more I destroy.

The paint smears,
A bloodied mess under my fingertips.
Each flaw is magnified,
Twisted in the light,
A grotesque reminder of my failure.
The work I once cherished
Now looks like a battlefield,
A war between my vision and reality,
Where nothing wins.

I tear the canvas in half,
The fabric screams in protest,
But I can’t stop.
I rip it apart—
Brutal, raw—
The fibers of my frustration
Fraying in the air.
Nothing feels like it's mine anymore.
The brush trembles in my hand,
A weight too heavy to carry.

I collapse into the mess,
The chaos I’ve made,
And the silence comes,
Not as a void, but as a truth—
The eerie quiet of an artist
Who’s found their shape in the ruins.
In the stillness,
I see the pieces of my soul
Scattered across the floor—
But they’re not broken.
They are just pieces.
I wonder—
Am I the painting,
Or is the painting me?
And perhaps…
We both need this destruction to be whole.

I stand, brush in hand,
Ready to start again—
With the same trembling hands,
The same uncertainty,
But this time with a quieter resolve.
I lay a fresh canvas before me,
The blankness no longer a threat,
But a promise.
A chance to begin anew,
To make something beautiful
From the mess of the past.
And so, I paint—
Not for perfection,
But for the beauty in the trying.

I thought I could outrun the weight,
but the burden was never mine—
like a passenger begging for control,
but only the crash was waiting,
and I didn't even scream.

He smiled like it was the last time,
And I knew it, though I didn’t ask why—
The air between us shifted,
Unspoken, like a secret the sky keeps,
Just for a moment, before it fades into silence.

His words lingered like a whisper caught in the wind,
Unspoken yet understood.
We were two fragments of something infinite,
Touching only briefly before slipping through the cracks of what could have been,
But in that brief pause, everything felt complete.

Willow limbs susurrate in clandestine murmurs,
brushing the lake’s gouache-green reflections.
Beneath—jellyfish effloresce, spectral inhalations,
ghost-thin, unmoored, drifting toward oblivion.

Dandelions unravel, golden tendrils severed,
carried off in the lungwork of wind.
A musk rose lingers—feral, aching,
its scent curling like unshed weeping
beneath the hush of twilight’s jaw.

Chevy lilts down arteries
stitched in coral marrow,
leather still inked with your laughter,
your dark brown eyes—
blackwood, abyss, a gravity
I would fall into, fracture utterly..

Et pourtant, je t’attends, infiniment.

And in this risette of evening,
where sky spills into sea, salt-lipped, weeping,
I wait—
soft, surrendered, affetuoso,
a note held past silence, raw, humming.

She was a girl with oceans inside her,
waves made of dreams too fragile to hold.
But the world is indifferent —
it pulls, it drowns, it takes,
leaving salt in the wounds it never cared to see.
Her tides fought back,
rising, crashing,
begging to be enough,
until exhaustion felt like peace.
Now she floats,
not sinking,
not swimming,
just there.

We were almost something—
almost a story,
almost a memory,
almost a beginning that never began.

It’s funny how “almost”
can hurt more than “never,”
because at least “never”
doesn’t pretend it had a chance.

But we—
we were a heartbeat away
from being real,
and sometimes,
that’s the loudest echo of all.

I make them smile,
not for ease,
nor for the brief bloom of laughter—
but because the world is a weight,
and lightness must be carved
by hands willing to bear the chisel.

I have seen sorrow move like a tide,
dragging its wreckage ashore,
leaving eyes hollow, shoulders bent,
hearts shaped like doors
that open to emptiness.

I have watched the weary—
not dying, but unlit,
not grieving, but undone—
souls curled inward like autumn leaves
that never learned the grace of falling.

So I place joy like a candle
in the cavern of the ribcage,
let it flicker against damp walls of doubt,
let it whisper—however briefly—
that there is still warmth, still wonder,
still a reason to lift the chin
toward the sky and call it home.

A smile is not salvation,
but it is rebellion—
against the hush of despair,
against time’s indifference,
against the notion
that we are meant to suffer in silence.

Let them call me foolish—
say laughter is fleeting,
that joy is a trick of the light.
I will still shape it, scatter it,
send it forth like a dandelion seed
that does not care
where the wind takes it—
only that it was given,
only that it was free.

I thought life was an equation,
one that could only exist in absolutes—
black against white,
sharp lines, clear edges.
But then, you blurred the borders,
redefined what it meant to be whole.

And I realized that in the spaces between,
where nothing is clear,
the most profound truths linger—
not in certainty,
but in the quiet chaos of change,
where we are found, whole in our imperfection.

I always knew this was coming,
but still, I fought it—
like a moth drawn to the flame,
not out of choice,
but because I was made to burn.

The flame flickered, promising a release
I couldn’t name,
and I chased it, desperate in my hunger,
pretending I had a chance,
knowing deep down it was never a choice—
only the inevitable path to surrender.

The house still breathes in jasmine,
walls steeped in monsoon whispers,
floor cool beneath bare feet,
where time lingers in the scent of sandalwood and warmth.

She sits, wrapped in the hush of afternoon,
silver hair catching sunlit threads,
fingers tracing stories into the skin of ripe mangoes,
soft hums curling through the air like incense.

The wind moves through neem leaves,
a song only she understands,
and in the hush between moments,
I swear the earth leans in to listen.

Before her hunger stirs,
she feeds the strays—
a quiet ritual of compassion,
her heart full, as if the world is fed.

Her voice is a river—deep, steady, endless,
carrying echoes of the past,
names of those who no longer walk these halls,
but whose laughter still clings to the doorframes.

And when she calls my name,
it is not just sound but something more—
a place, a belonging,
a love that lingers, like jasmine at dusk.

The cup of tea
sat cold on the table,
I waited for her,
but the chair remained empty.

A grind—bones against gravel,
Flesh pulled thin by rusted teeth.
A wail, swallowed by the wind,
Spat back hollow, broken.

The carousel, once a carnival of hope,
Rots in a barren field.
Its beasts—hulking shadows,
Eyes wide, frozen in fear
Of what never came.

Time loops—endless, merciless—
A cruel ring of blood and ash,
Twisting upon itself,
Never ending, never beginning,
Only echoing empty promises.

The wind howls with ghosts of lost ambition,
Claws dragging across splintered wood,
Brushing rusted metal—
Each touch a whisper
Of what could have been, but never was.

Dreams died here.
No one mourned.
They only rotted,
Sinking into the earth,
Leaving behind echoes
No one dares to hear.

And still, the carousel spins—
Not because it wants to,
But because it's too broken to stop.

The waves hit harder,
the closer you get—
I learned the sea doesn’t care about your longing;
it will take without warning,
pulling you under,
because you thought you could stay dry
and you may drown,
or you may rise,
but either way,
you’ll never return the same.