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Jan 2019
You’re afraid of heights and I of depth
The fear of not having anything to fall back onto
Or the fear of not having something to stand on no matter how wreck-less you allow your mistakes to be
Depth goes in all dimensions, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t stop at deep dark waters
It continues its way through my veins
Through baseless strength and unstable reasons
The look of darkness that finishes into nothingness

It stops at undoubting resilience which I cannot reach

I still like looking into it though, it thrills me
A second, a push and it’ll take me to that resilience or into nothingness
But it scares you, only because it comes from a height
It makes your stomach turn and hands weak
Not of what’s inside of that but of what it takes to get there

It was sometime between 11:30 pm and midnight

You’re afraid of heights and I of depth
You know, the one that stops at undoubting resilience
One which I cannot reach
It makes me sick and my chest feels hollow
My fingers look for grip
And my legs usually shake

But last night I wasn’t afraid
When you pulled my hand back
as I leaned against the edge of the wall above Thames
There was this radiance in your eyes
Brown, which people don’t talk about enough when they exemplify the beauty of eyes

Brown, the depth of which I hadn’t faced before
But I refused to be afraid of
Uncertain if the depth grew with my fingers shaking or your stomach turning

Your brown
Of how its succumbed with restlessness when you’re drunk
Of concern and constant pressure of not losing control of your shield
But still so pure
The hue which deepens when you talk about the person you love
Repeatedly, because you find words insufficient
And of how sometimes you leave traces to the problems you never speak about
The colour that grows deeper the more you look into it
The colour that nurtures the light of the laughter of the people you care about

The brown that falls asleep in complete innocence
Letting down all your guard during so
Slowly, part by part
The one which looks at me with sub-consciousness when your arms pull me in
The gradient that tries to make sure I have company till I pass out
The depth of which I don’t know if I’m scared of

2 hours later it was almost 2 am, and

You’re afraid of heights and I of depth
You know, the one that stops at undoubting resilience
But last night I think I wasn’t afraid
There was this radiance in your eyes
Radiance bright enough to show me the lighter side of depth

It grew brighter with every acceptance of your feelings
And darker with the realization of so
A shade darker every time I tried to draw meaning out of it
Dark to the hue of your afternoon tiredness
As you gently traced delicate lines with your fingers on my back
And softly locked our bodies together, your breath warming my neck
To no fall, nor any height
No stomach turns or shaky legs

It’s way past dawn almost 9am now,
My sleep breaks to realizations

You’re still afraid of heights and I of depth
But last night your brown carried me away
I was still afraid of depths as much as you were of heights
It’s just that your brown was almost a glorified one
One that gently looked at me with assurance

Your brown
Brown, which people don’t talk about enough when they exemplify the beauty of eyes
The brown that I looked into as the sunlight illuminated its light
Your morning brown
Your lightest brown
Which hardly lasted a minute
The best hue, gradient and gold that it could turn to be
Looking around with a blur
Only until it grows back to its darkest shade,
Deeper than the waters last night
Putting your guard back on

It’s way past dawn almost 9am now
My sleep breaks to realizations
You’re still afraid of heights, and I of depth
I’d say you know the drill by now
But this morning, the branches of your umber grew back onto me
Prashasti Saxena
Written by
Prashasti Saxena  17/F/London
(17/F/London)   
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