Late Night Thoughts- Slowly and Slowly

Painting by Jarek Puczel

The days are still long and the nights still are immeasurable, but memories of you, the thought of you, your brown eyes, your big nose, your hands, all now lies on the horizon. There is no fear if they cross, or if they stay there. Slowly and slowly, the line would fade.

The ocean is dark and deep as it always was, but I have learned to swim. I no longer fear of getting drowned in you, by you. The tides roar high and search for me, but my feet have befriended sand, clasping it tight. I no longer fear of getting devoured by the eerie sound of the tides. The screams from the torrent of your ruthless love do not shut, but the calmness of letting you go is not perturbed. I no longer fear getting swallowed. Slowly and slowly, the ocean would dry.

Your sun has set, and the summer of love has faded away into the cold mist. The moonlight has disowned your shadow, and the stars don’t look for you, yet somehow your face is reflected when they twinkle. Slowly and slowly, the cold mist would cloud the stars.

The day you named my prayer a curse for you, I puked out all the love for you over the memories we shared. However, I doubt myself if I puked it all, while I write this, thinking about you. But I know that, I will spill them out, slowly and slowly, poem by poem, word by word, smoothly emptying my body, and making space for another love, the one I always deserved, the one worthy to have and worthy to keep.

-Kritika Vashist

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Nothing

Illustration by Soltreis

The fog outside has veiled
the summer of love
of you and me
and the sunshine still
peeps through the spaces
between the branches and trees
and falls on my face you once knew
on my hands that waved goodbye
and I know, it isn’t because of you
it isn’t because the sun still shines,
it’s the unconsciousness
weaving poems, word after a word
poems that are soporific, not lullabies
poems, without a meaning
without a purpose,
and they don’t matter,
not even the sieved sunshine,
nothing does…

-Kritika Vashist

That’s All I Am

I wear your shadow
The vulnerable imprints of you
On my unvulnerable body
Outlining the skin
Burned by your love

Should I trace or break them down?

Our stories
Our sorrows
Engulfed in my
Hallowed bones

Should I save them or let them drown?

The paralyzed heart
Permute the remains of love
Into words, bit by bit
Threading a veil of
Poetries of you, for you

Should I embrace or destroy them?

But there’s no way
To breakthrough you
When my poetry finds only you
Within and beyond my horizon

But there’s no way
When that’s the all I have, all I know
All I survive with, all I survive for
When that’s all I am.

Kritika Vashist

Six Word Story (III)

I Like To Think

I like to think that
when you said
I have become you
and
you have become me
we both started to live
with each other’s flaws
without a fight
without a compulsion
and
we loved each other
more than ever before.

-Kritika Vashist

Two Phrase Story (VII)

This is in response to Himanshu’s Two Phrase Story. You too can participate by clicking here.

Today’s phrase was; The distinct metallic clink told him…

-Kritika Vashist

The Second Time I Called You (Part I of II)

The second time I called you, I could only hear the phone ring, longer than I heard your hello when I earlier called. And when you thought I said nothing, but I had said everything that was left with me – The Silence. That’s all left. That’s all I can share. That’s what I promised. That’s how it is going to be, for ever – An eternity of silence.

It’s been so long without you, that it already feels like a lifetime has passed, and us sharing this silence throughout. There is nothing between us now, that’s what I say before I put myself to sleep every night and whenever my heart tries to reach over yours. There is nothing between us, except this space. This space that spreads to infinity, like the moonlight in our eyes did on that evening when we sat under the starlight sky, beholding the moon. There is nothing left between us, just this space, permeating each corner of my bones, even in the thickness of the kohl at the corner of my eyes.

This silence, where I speak more than a thousand word every day, where I sing of the love that has still clasped me, as tight as before, where I dance in the madness of believing that my unrequited love would survive amidst my consciousness, where I shudder in fear of forgetting my face seeing yours between the frame of the painting inscribed with my name and face, this silence has grown so large in this space that it echoes loud, so loud that these words pull me towards themselves, and pin down all the overwhelming feelings and love I had hidden all these days, on a mere piece of paper.

When I stare outside the window, gazing at the tree whose leaves have started to fall, I constantly shift my body weight from one leg to another, like my unsettling thoughts, which don’t stop shifting from one to another. The movements of legs ache my knee, and the movements of thoughts ache my head, and everything of me. My mind has become the tape recorder, and these thoughts, the songs in it. But this tape recorder keeps on playing its melancholic songs; there is no play, there is no pause. There is no control.

My body has become a haunted house, with broken windows, cracked walls, dusted floors, empty rooms, fallen roofs and webbed memories. I don’t want you to come closer to it, I don’t want anyone else to unravel my secrets, dead pieces of me inside and beneath the soil, and unfathomable depth of you in me. The skin on my body still have your traces, like the imprints of my fingers on that book that you long ago held at nights and read, and in others as well, which you buried under all your inconsequential things. There is no way to reach back to these traces, and there is no possibility to draw more.

– Kritika Vashist