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Writer's pictureAishwarya Jayal

The Octopus of Words

Tenderness of a hug,

Enveloped in his calling.

A voice came to,

It’s origins near the much requited heart.

The warmth is palpable.


Words,

Never complete,

Undulate into a many-faceted creature of visions;

Into images of a happy future;

walks of togetherness in sunsets;

lazy afternoons of music and books;

And the intimately secure dreams,

In the lap of a beloved.


Conversations,

After a while, desist.

What remains is their imprints.

The melodies of the spoken words,

The loud silence of the unspoken.

These vibrations resound from somewhere within the soul.

In flashes,

Of the reminiscences bursting through.


For is love, but a poetry of jumbled words;

With the meter decipherable only in twos?

For often,

Words are all we have.

Those spoken,

And those lost within.


Today he’s calling again,

And like a mermaid;

I swim to the flow of his melody.

For what are we but fluid water melting in passion?

His heart booms with sound,

drums beating in the fanfare of ceremony;

His lungs filled with air,

Taking in all of it;

So I have to reach him to catch my breath again.

And this breath turns into sound.


The sound that my soul sings its chorus to,

Our chorus,

for now we’re but two voices in one.

And the octopus of his words engulfs me;

It’s body moist and warm;

It’s eight arms wrapped tightly around me;

In the embrace of an intoxicating dance;

lulling me to an intimately secure sleep;

While our souls converse of the love of the moon.


What are words, but disjointed music? Yet sometimes when speaking to someone familiar, their voice and intonations take on a life of their own. Soon, we are not only able to identify their multiple idiosyncrasies in conversations, but also look forward to their very own specific way of responses. The slight shy smile with a brush of the hair when responding to something cute, the furrowed forehead and unseeing eyes when thinking hard about something, the mischievous twitch near the lips before a joke, the loving exasperation in a sigh between harsh sensible words! It’s magical, especially when it happens with someone with a soul connect. And then suddenly, you’re not listening to words alone, but floating along at sea, in a raft, under free open skies at night with the moon shining on you and thinking about classical music! Of course, by now I know how much I zone out in conversations! :P This prose tries to better encapsulate this feeling, with ample space to cover the spectrum on both black and white. Do let me know you thoughts, I promise to listen :)

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