Poetry

Will you come back and pick up your belongings lying breathless in your old room? Will you reclaim the home you once fled from? Will you pick up the ghost-leaf that rests on your window sill, a relic of the last autumn that passed without you?

Will you come back and pick up the dreams boxed-up under your bed? Will you pick up your nobody-self, who knew the real you, now that you are someone? Will you return for the last raindrop that stopped falling after you left? Will you pick up your old journal, the one you swore never to read?

Will you face it all, picking up the pieces of your former bronze self, now that you’ve become gold?

The edge of a leaf, tip of a nose, head of a pen,  the weight of grief…. bring it closer and closer until it dissolves into haze.

“Ignorance is bliss” they say. Feign it until it fades. Forget that it exists — the fields of agony, the intoxication of limerence, an era of distrust.

The world is too close that it can rust. The world is too distant to marry it. Eyes shatter at the ugly truth of it. The mirror disturbs; the baggage cracks the concentration. So, I am learning to unsee.

Thick ice on a hilltop, fog vanishing in the rain, a starless heaven with squinted eyes. All are like you — distant, distant and distant until it’s a blur.

©️kanikachugh

How can you say non-living things do not have life living inside of them? These things breathe, reminisce, sigh out the essence of a person they were last used by. Every remnant, every corner reeks of their earlier presence and you try to find that person in bits and pieces. The slippers they wore before, the pan they cooked in, the tie they showed off, the books they touched, the lamp they bought for you, all these lifeless objects hold a tiny light of their owners. You could make a whole human out of the parts they left themselves in. It’s too hard to see these objects not breathing in their persona anymore.

Things do not make a room look empty. The absence of someone using them does.

Feet to the ground, a smile in the eyes
I think I dreamt
when I saw you at the doorway.

The soul absorbs memories, settled like dust particles
I surely witnessed those particles
glowing in your light.
I was too much of myself for you in that moment.

My head disconnected from my heart
my heart astounded by my fanning hands

It was you at the doorway.
It was you, or
An expensive, delicate Winter’s Sun

©️kanikachugh

I’m just a chapter girl
a girl from a random part of the story no one remembers.
I’m the girl friends forget to invite.
I’m the girl cousins don’t mention to their kids.
An NPC in my own game.
I’m not the girl you root for in a novel,
Just a bystander, a friend of a friend of the protagonist,
existing only to push them further in their story.
I’m a girl far from popularity,
a girl who is good in college
not good enough for the hall of fame,
nor bad enough to linger in the minds and
tongues of teachers or professors.
I exist. I just exist.
In a square, a block, walled in on every side.
My role is limited to a single chapter,
where no one remembers that I never got closure,
not even the writers themselves.

©️kanikachugh

I feel it too much
those lines I highlight in my current novel,
the black necklace somebody gifted and forgot,
dried sunflower still in a glass full of water,
my apron’s pocket full of herbs by my mother,
those coffee breaks where I miss my best colleague,
my journal’s empty pages where I scribble and scribble until it holds nothing.
I feel it all, in the darkest of hours or in the crack of the dawn.
Feelings stick with me like a leech who eats you up. I wish I could feel less. But then I think I would probably live less.

©kanikachugh

Smog doesn’t make it easy
neither the feet tapping to curb the cold.
Feels tiresome than last time, somehow.
This wait! The wait
of two blaring headlights
running greasily on snake tracks
approaching from the no-land
on blue-black, blurry winter nights.
This time, the wait is over
I tell my heart.
2 mins before the clock hits 10,
It will arrive.
You’ll arrive.
It will be over and
It will be worth it.
These ten years.
you’ll be here, as promised,
before it’s 10, you said.
I stopped the time for you,
You’ll be here at 9:5 68
And no more years to wait.

©️kanikachugh

I see an Earth worm

It disgusts me .

So much so that I

Judge, and judge, and judge

‘Why don’t you grow?

Why this dirt comforts you?

Why are you so slow?’

And let it die

in pretence of helping it.

Then I blame it couldn’t take

the pressure this life offers.

I’m not at fault.

After all I’m a human too,

I did what humans do

Kill!

In the mornings,
I see you, I meet you
we exchange some greetings
Initiate small talk and then
we both go our separate ways.

At night, I write letters to you
letters enclosing vulnerabilities
letters carrying intimacy
letters that I’ll never send
hand-written letters that
know the unapologetic, ego-less me,
letters that could have brought us together and made us laugh at 2am in the kitchen
letters in my drawer that chokes to death every night.

Again, in the morning
we see each other, do a small talk
like some religion
and I constantly chant
in the back of my mind
‘You’re not the same person I talk to
every night but oh, I so wished you were’.
And we go our separate ways.