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