The last time I saw you sipping time on his rooftop, your wounds were smaller and my heart bigger than it ever would be. I had learnt to love you despite the smell of wild daffodils on your breath, and the look of expensive pride in your eyes - things you were willing to give up when you first hugged me with the surprising confidence of an old world pilgrim hugging the shores of new America and bringing with it the hopes and bitterness of the transatlantic blues.

The last time I saw you sipping time on his rooftop, the neighbours said that if I had arrived a bit earlier, I would have heard the sound of his sandy boots crashing against your rotten hardwood flooring, drowning your cries for constant help. His clenched fists might have broken your apartment window, But you begged me to give him the benefit of the doubt - maybe unlike me, he had never fallen for a wild daffodil before.

The last time I saw you sipping time on his rooftop, I remember confessing how you weren't truly my first love - that honour instead belonged to a monsoon paperboat that hado shown up at my flooded doorstep when I hadnt yet crossed the ripe old age of five.
Looking back - you told me, those were probably my golden years of romantic maturity.

The last time I saw you sipping time on his rooftop, you failed to realize why men kept falling over their swords to win the curled up furball crying in my arms, wearing an unasked crown of broken hearts. I wish you had remembered what i had said.

People loved you not because your face shone the brightest or you looked more beautiful than every damsel dancing in the ghostly courts of a dying town. Instead people kept coming back to you because you were Kolkata, you were literally this city.

The last time I saw you, we were sitting on the edges of a different city i had chosen to call my own. But I wish you had realized what I meant.