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Writer's pictureAishwarya Jayal

Inanition

The bed is cold this morning.

I can’t seem to find the right way up

In this sea of unending duvets.

Double beds feel impossibly large

When their contents are halved.


Maybe I’m dreaming,

And in my dreams,

I’m a humongous cliff,

Surrounded by angry grey clouds,

That neither rain for relief,

Nor thunder to express.

Bereft of lightening;

They aimlessly move around,

Almost tangible balls of despair.


Everything that once felt excitingly familiar -

Feels bland, almost unalive.

Like wet summer noons;

Freshly abandoned by rainbows,

Were now doomed to the anonymous greys of loneliness.


Can what's never lived, feel life?


For the squeaky spring in this mattress,

The sleepy rustle of bedcovers,

The click of the cupboard

Moving into a comfortable position for the night,

Is suddenly quiet,

Silent.

As though there were nothing there,

to move for.


Even the mess on the bedside table

Feels rusty,

Almost Ugly,

As though the beauty in its disarray,

was mere perspective.


The clock was on cocaine

Since you left,

To now.

And now,

At the end of its hiatus,

It lapses into slow oblivion.


In search of you,

I’ve rolled too far,

Too much,

The duvet is wrapped under my weight,

The soft pillow has jilted my head,

and I,

I am resigned to staring at the clock

to wind-up again.

Of love, longing and emptiness, the most has been written; yet, never enough. This prose too is themed on the emptiness that sets in immediately after a loved one leaves. It's irrational, because its just a temporary blip. Almost inexplicably impossible: as it's occurrence has basis in fact and logic.


And yet, it exists.

Ah! I know not of all thoughts of those in love, but what I do, I feel.

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