The walls of the narrow way echoed the feelings my tongue couldn't deliver into words….
The silence could gulp even my darkest fears..
Long forgotten shreds of memories
The sound of the fans in my Dojo..
The counts of the sensei….
Ending in sweetbread and a night ride in our grandpa's old active..

Remorse defeats my rage.Why???
I do not know..

Days when you demanded chocolates for the prints my gloves left on your cheeks,
But today, the marks your fists made run deep inside my tummy.. It erupts a vacuum inside me that cadburys can never fill..

Realising,
That pain loses its purity once the ring disappears…
Wondering,
When did I start confusing maturity with arrogance.

2007,
I remember looking down at you,
on the floor clinging on my knees
2011,
The first day of your school
Break visit
You hugging me tight,
Rain pouring down, June smiling down on us…
Breaks later, me still trapped in the baker block strapped to your arm with a bunch of primary kids…..
2020,
Now I have to lift my heavy head up to see your face…
45°somehow drifts as even further…
I don't know if it's the gravity or the silence that hurts more..
I 'am' happy to see you..
But the years of dragging must have dissolved my smile…
So I ask myself,
When did maturity become a license for arrogance?

I wish we could go back to those times… .
When I say those times I do not mean the Christmas nights…
The hangings , the lights, fixing up the tree past dark..
the aftertaste of nuts and plum on the edge of your tongue,
The bittersweet of grape wine that still ferments my throat…
Watching the star on the porch till February because no one cared to take them down… .

When I say those times,
I don't mean the weekend trips, BBQ in the middle of the forest,
the smell of lemon,
the juice dripping down the chicken
watering our mouths.
A feeling, whose reasons, our brains seemed to forget..
I do not mean the times we jumped up and down in my bed to the rhythms of our mom's radio that's now broken and dusty somewhere in the attic… ..

When I say those times,I don't mean that day when we hid inside our little house when you punched a kid in the face when he commented on my body….
Not those times you shouted at me when I was joking about death..
Definitely not that time when we were walking home from the bus stop and you threw your finger in the air, to those idiots when I clearly had a voice.

I am talking about those times when my heart wasn't as cold. ..
When my resting face wasn't a static form of indifference.....
When you used to make sexist jokes to provoke me .
before all the vigour died, but I can't seem to find the end point in time…

Before I could differentiate between love and hate..
Now I'm shattered into pieces and no matter how carefully I integrate,
My feelings get nullified in the end..
When you kicked me in the stomach,
All I saw was the antagonist of all my nightmares,
A misogynistic face of patriarchal chauvinism lashing out at me
the fear and the rage consumed me
leaving me helpless.
But deep inside this emotional sphere that I carry around at the center of it all,
the feminist in me dies….
their lives a girl whose own blood burns her skin.
She weeps.

I do not cry for her.

I can't comfort her.
Maturity has made us strangers.
How can I blame you for the drift between us, when I have created spaces in between pieces of myself ……
when I'm burning down bridges, every day. Inside of me,
so I'm sitting here in this dark hallway, wondering,
when did maturity became a synonym for distance… .