Stone paper scissors…Dear Moavi in this street full of pebbles and nails somehow I could walk in the sea of the dead the water tastes sweet and yet I’m drowning… holding to you grasping for you, reciting your name in all the breaths so shallow… there’s an endless depth down below yet I’m drowning towards the sky where you have brought what you have thought what you want to convey why suddenly I can’t see no more.
It’s been ages since you last lost… once near the train once near the Charles bridge once you were decorated in polka dots and once it was raining cats and dogs, why it’s so magical to have you around why time stops and why you vanish all my seconds and hours why it’s only minutes that I get in your realm why there’s shadow and why it’s so dark why I can still feel the air why I feel breathless all of a sudden what you do to me and why I asphyxiate to be annihilated by you.
See there you are laughing again there you are…I wonder if you pity or you smile for the desperation you bring out in me, I wonder if you think or you or you just frown as I annoy you with my trivial affairs… in your realm I have never lost in your realm I forget what I’m even fighting for.
Did you see that cat that just passed by over the wooden ramp next to the fireflies…creation is just a thought with you isn’t it, suddenly she peered into my eyes suddenly there’s no difference between me and her…I can feel my new paws an attitude so royal furs so light I can hear the faraway crickets and I can jump over any wall in hindsight…I can be on any roof I want I can break in any of the windows, the light the sound the air, and the ground everything seems so different everything seems so new like even though they always were here why it took me to become a cat to start a new…will you walk next to me will you play like a mouse with me…I want you to win this time I want to lose and I want to be lost, I know I can love but the cat that I have become doesn’t allow me to love back, the cat in me wants me to be alone the cat in me says that world isn’t ready for my questions my answers and the rationale that says but neither of them are mine.
Can I be back to being normal again can I be back to just being yours can I just lift my pen and start writing…only to realize there are no words left there’s no rhyme that I can recite no verse I can call mine…Portrait of a young man a landscape of his emotions and a monochrome of his freedom.
Moavi as I close my eyes I see the lake I see the temples with bells resonating in a pitch so familiar yet new…Dear Moavi you have left me again.
Again with a heart that beats in the precise range again with a mind fixated on the light of another end, again with the legs who are refusing to rest again with eyes witnessing the bridge burning to ashes again with hands holding a cigarette whose smoke fills the canvas so banal and plain again thinking of you again longing for you….and again there are fireflies there’s a wooden ramp and a cat just vanished in broad daylight.
By: Kshitij Sinha
20/07/2023