You have always been a whiskey person, but you sip on warm Kaluha today,
the caffeine seeping into your dark lips
like age has seeped into the spine of your home
slowly, crack by crack. The walls have eaten
paint for so long and now they're bulimic,
throwing up shards of plaster on a floor
matted with dust. You sit on the huge armchair,
the one your grandfather smuggled in parts out of Lahore, and stare at yourself in the huge mirror on the armoire your grandmother got in her dowry. A broken teapot stares at you, sitting among other cracked China, in the high glass cabinet in the kitchen. Your mother served a million cups of tea in this house while your father sat and recited poetry in the verandah. The pillars of this house know your stories and the old mattress in the guest room still remembers the taste of the salt in your tears.
This house has been home to all your dark and all your light yet there is little left now. It feels as if the house went through a series of heartbreaks and now has given up on love. You identify with it more now, than you ever have.
And you know its time to leave.
Leaving is hard, but staying has become its own cancer, slowly spreading dark in your veins
and the house's.
So you sit with your home, one last time, thinking of the rights words for the perfect Goodbye, yet all you can manage is a grunted sigh.
A single tear makes a plop in the dust below. You put down your glass of Kaluha in the wet of your tear and walk out the door.
It takes everything in you
to not turn back.