you tell me nothing’s wrong and that i shouldn’t worry,
your face comes to me, smaller than ever
on my lap in the backseat.
limbs already too long to be sleeping here, 
but nobody ever said no to you.
with the lights playing their little games on your little face,
you look so beautiful when you don’t fight the feeling. 
some nights when my trembling bones can no longer hold my pride,
and i’ve shed my faith like a dog losing hair,
through the phone i hear a voice
and feel the years thin into something i can almost look through,
and on the other side, i find you.
i could cup your face in my palms 
and for a while we’ll both be young again,
where none of us has chosen wrong or fallen apart.
we can be two big babies, crying out loud 
to each other.
between phone calls cut too short,
and words you’ve learned to keep inside,
time took your ease on its wings when it flew.
but underneath my pillow, 
i’ve tucked your truest laugh,
the one that bubbles out when it’s just us two. 

Leaving behind home, yet again. Unbrushed mouth and eyes heavy with a sleep that never quite arrives fully. The night sky turning bright—you can almost witness the darkness being sucked out of it. I can hear the faint, muffled sound of chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaaye ham dono leaking through the headphones of the woman sitting beside me, which she must’ve forgotten to take out before surrendering to exhaustion. This is exactly what I find so lovely about travelling alone on trains. Thinking about my third-grade class teacher who used to be unusually nice to me. Heard from a junior that she’s forgetting everyday things and might quit teaching soon. As a kid, sometimes I liked to imagine that all of it was a bad dream, and that the sun might arrive wrapped in her palm and warm my blood again. That doesn’t work anymore.

13 Feb, 1:43 am

The cold, comforting sting of freshly changed sheets against my skin. The pale glow beside my bed the only thing illuminating the room. Spent more than an hour talking to friends about their old, fermented relationship drama. It fuels the cynicism, sure. But it also makes me awfully sad. The same thing always happens. We fall in love with the outline of a person and then resent them for what they could not become. You can only love silhouettes so much. We blame people for changing suddenly, but in all honesty, they were always changing—we just stood too close to witness it.

And isn’t most of love an attempt to escape the self? Two people running in opposite directions from themselves, colliding. A boy I came so close to loving wished I would cut myself open so he could slip inside. And why bother loving, then, if you’ll spend more time trying to forget? I’m not very good at either of those things. I fail as a lover, and then I fail at trying not to be one. Everything erodes except this stubborn, bitter love.

14 Feb, 7:35 pm

The white, unforgiving overhead fluorescent lights of the hospital waiting room. Plain beige walls that insist on making you taste the hopelessness of this place. Don’t ask me my V-Day plans. A middle-aged couple sitting a few chairs down, who had been talking in hushed voices, has fallen silent now. A look at them is all it takes to know they’ve cycled through the five stages of grief in the span of a day. The woman rests her head on the man’s shoulder, and they both shut their eyes. The tenderness of this simple act is enough to melt the glass walls surrounding my heart.

Truth is, when asked about past loves, I always talk about what went wrong—why it ended. I tell no one about how another’s hand kissed the soft of my palm when despair took me under. I pluck the petals of kindness and present only the thorned stem of mistakes and reason. Thinking I’m above love might spare my stupid heart the bruises it so readily collects, but it also keeps me from admitting that I find it so lovely to see humans latch onto one another and make some sense of reality when the world around us is an absolute shit show. And what is the alternative, anyway? To move through this life untouched, unheld, unmoved?

You orbited someone long enough to witness the loss of whatever bound you together. And yes, it ached so much when you fell apart—but your pain exists only as an affirmation of your love. All this bitterness because of all the love. And at the center of it all, a cocktail of emotions—

I wish we could’ve been better at loving each other. I wish I knew myself better at the time. Despite everything, I can’t bring myself to regret any of it. I hope you have an easier time falling asleep now.

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when all your shining bottles spill empty on the ground,
and the unfurling smoke’s false solace finally chills your lungs,
we’ll light up a screen— google maps, satellite view— and zoom into your old town,
watch your street fall into sleep while the waning crescent stays hung.
i won’t rush to fill the air, for my words are futile sound,
and babe, you know it well: time that slipped through won’t ever come around.

if the bottom of your glass has caught you in the chase,
and the reflection staring back murmurs promises you made but may not fulfil,
set the night down with the glass, latch onto my embrace,
we’ll make a shrine of this bedside; i’ll offer a lithium-laced pill.
and if you flirt with the idea or fall back into old ways,
my love shall remain a forlorn hand reaching through the haze.

maybe it would do me good to step away, to break free,
get some sleep— dream a dream your blown up pupils won’t come to haunt,
but my heart can’t drive a hard bargain when your dying eyes are all i see,
so flush your empty vices, baby— you can spend the night with anyone you want,
just slip back into bed before dawn, next to me.


But in his parents’ room it is still the summer of ‘23 and I’m swapping spit with a boy I met only two weeks before. He insists that the framed gods on the wall don’t mind being the witnesses to our feasting. I don’t argue. Desire is a spineless, breathing thing that pulses through us and leaves us dizzy. So even if those psychologists from Western State College were to float straight into that dim-lit space, charts and clipboards in hands, I would gladly trade a lifetime for a kiss so sweet.

When praying mantises mate, the female bites the male’s head off. His nervous system disintegrates, but he still has control over his motor functions. He offers up his body so lovingly for her to feast upon, and she swallows him in and translates him into the future. So it’s not just us, you see. Love makes animals out of us.

It’s 11 am in the pasta aisle of the always empty grocery store back home and you are falling to your knees because there is nothing sensical about wanting. Love might as well be a chimerical throb inside your ribcage. It pours out of you, paying no mind to the clock or the coordinates. A pull so magnetic it liquifies all the logic in your mind. And haven’t you felt it, too? Don’t you feel your hand twitch to warm your beloved’s?

After the press of your mouth, I have lived a few lives inside the one that I’ve been given. In each, I’ve stood on the split lip of faith and asked the gods to keep your smile. If this is what kills me, I’ve never felt more alive.

Two drinks in, she admits she wanted you to have a different story. Fine, you’ll give her a new one then. You will paint the rooms brighter, turn the lights down, make the characters sorrier. If that is what she wants, you will give it to her. A couple is kindest to each other a day before the divorce. You want to tell her you’re sorry, but you don’t know that yet. You can only make sense of your feelings after the thing has happened. Right now, you are clueless. Her face is wet from the rain, and you’ve never found her more beautiful. In two days, you’ll be standing in front of the fridge with the door open. The cold air will chill your spine, but you’ll crave it. You will have opened and closed the door so many times you’ll catch the exact moment the light turns off. And then it’ll come to you—the moment it went wrong. You are so vulgar with your emotions it disgusts people. Including you, but only in past tense. The first time you met her, you read her your stories. They say the first week of every love affair reveals its end.

You are driving down the highway on a bright August morning, and the radio is playing your favourite song. Someone else is singing along. You look back to find a child in the backseat. Dark hair, brown eyes, red shirt. But what is he doing in your car? He calls you mom, and you don’t want to be a mom. What do you do now? You push your foot down on the accelerator. You watch him shrink into the seat. He tells you he is sick and dying. You release the accelerator. You are not his mom, but you don’t want him to die. Your favourite song ends, and another you don’t particularly like fills up the air, but you don’t rush to change it. You miss your mom. You were driving then too, and she was sick and dying in the backseat. The silver moonlight haemorrhaged on your dashboard. You shouldn’t have thought about the funeral then. At the funeral, everyone was saying the right things, and it was driving you mad. But you couldn’t push your fist into their chests, so you sat there, unmothered and confused. The boy in your backseat is also sitting there, unmothered and confused. Kiss his face. Someone has to.

It is the end of another summer and I’m lovelorn, a wounded animal curled up in my bed upstairs. Despite the faint pulse in my head, there’s not much to complain about. Through the window’s gaps the sun peeks each afternoon, alchemizing whatever my eyes fall upon. I keep thinking about what it means to be worthy—what it entails, what it feels like. What goes through people’s heads when they rush to tell you “no, you deserve it” when you only ever hint you feel otherwise? Am I worthy of love? And if so, when did I become it? When did my curled, gilled body metamorphose into something lovers deem deserving? Does suffering in love make me more deserving of it? Are we all panting dogs at love’s door, tongues out, watching someone else flirt with the idea of throwing a treat?

Each morning this summer, I woke tasting of metal. It is the aftertaste of memory, perhaps. Lovestruck, I had been, somewhere in the middle— I found myself in the belly of the beast. I engraved a name into its walls and fed on it painstakingly. Soon enough, a love insect swam its way beneath my skin and turned me lovesick with its fever. I keep going back to it—the feverish thrill, the daydreaming—knowing all too well that the knife of separation will drop inevitably. I think the high lies in the delay. Love is, it seems, my dearest disease; I want its hands to stay deep in the soil of my body.

In Sanskrit, the word smar (स्मर) means both to desire and the memory of it. The womb through which my mother tongue emerges makes no distinction between the two. My recollections of you are interlaced with the desire to be with you again. To watch you kiss through half-lidded eyes, to drink all the poison your lips offer. And then, until the last breath escapes me, to spend every second peering through the thin fabric of memory.

Last week, as I learned to drive, I sat anxiously in the front seat— panic calcifying gradually into my bones. I kept picturing how you drove: your spine straight, chin up, half a smile like you owned the world. I could almost picture the way mauve bruised the sky that evening, could almost hear you say how you wanted to love me once again before autumn began, for the last time.

In his letter to Bosie, Wilde wrote “everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.” In some other life, I don’t kneel before false Gods, don’t make altars out of people. This is not that life. My eyes are drooping with something heavier than sleep. Fall will befall us soon, and maybe I won’t dream of you as much this time.

The view from Mihir’s window bathes in the golden hour, light splitting the clouds in places and falling almost graciously. In two hours, the train will reach Delhi, and he will go back to his life as before. But for these two hours, he gets to rest his head against the train window and watch the world pass through his irises. He feels no need to speak to someone or listen to them. Feels no need to be anything other than what he is—insignificant. Since childhood, he has been fond of train journeys. It’s strange, he thinks, in the sway of the train, he feels most still.

The buzzing of his phone, placed face down for a while now, echoes in the compartment. He doesn’t check it. doesn’t need to. Must be her. He ignored her the whole time he was at home. Not her fault, he knows. It’s just that they had left things on a strange note. The party—the loud bass of the music that seemed to have a hold on his heartbeat. The sound of her laugh from across the room, finding some joke hilarious—not his. And then the pretending. You looked like you were enjoying yourself, he had said with his eyes closed in the backseat of the cab they shared. Is that a problem for you? Her voice was clipped. It hadn’t sounded like her voice at all. He almost felt mad at himself for asking. And then, too exhausted to retort with something pettier, he had let the silence swallow the rest of the ride.

Two weeks ago, as the soft sizzling sound of cumin being put in oil filled the kitchen, his Ma had asked him if he had a girlfriend. He had thought of her then—thought of the press of her fingers on his jaw. The self she had hid behind all her self-righteousness and sarcasm. The one he only got to see in glimpses from time to time. Her name was perched on the tip of his tongue. But she wasn’t his girlfriend; they were too messy for that. Too many doors he had slammed, too many things she had spit out in rage. Deciding against it, he had shaken his head no.

Now, inside the train, the little boy relentlessly tries to convince his father for another game. Tugging at his shirt pocket, he cries: Papa, bas ek baar aur. Mihir finds it pesky. His father’s demeanour, though, hints at no such feeling. If the kid were his, he would’ve probably thrown him out the window by now. He startles himself with this thought, then sighs, amused by his uncalled-for cruelty. He must have been the kid at some point, he thinks. And the thought is immediately followed by him feeling sorry for his mother. Which covers most of what he feels for her these days.

He watches the father humour his son with a smile. Lets him pull at his shirt pocket and pester him with the same sentence. By the twenty-second Papa, bas ek baar aur, the corner of the father’s mouth curves and he nods. The child squeals in triumph, rushing to rearrange the pieces. His father watches him with an expression that makes the answer obvious: he would have said yes every time. Exhaustion, it seems, was not strong enough to fight affection.

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Something about the sight takes Mihir back in time. It had been Vijayadashami. Calcutta, wrapped in red and gold, had looked nothing short of a bride. He remembered waiting for Baba at home all day—eyes returning to the door every few minutes. But as his father returned with staggering feet, all hopes in the eyes of the seven-year-old had dimmed.

Upon his mother’s requests, his father had agreed to take him out to the pandals. Mihir, dressed in new clothes his Ma had bought, sat on his Baba’s motorcycle—both arms around his middle. The city lights flashed and dimmed in places, but the twinkle in his eyes didn’t burn out. Not until later, at least.

The streets of Sreebhumi were clamorous with conversations, queues ranging up to kilometres. A toy cart was stationed on the side of the road where Mihir’s dad had parked his bike. As he crouched on the motorcycle seat, his eyes had fallen on a chess set—a wooden board with mahogany and maple squares. He had seen the same one on TV some days ago; it had fascinated him. He pointed it out to his father, who seemed to be oblivious to what Mihir had said and fired up the engine. In order to get his Baba’s attention, Mihir started tugging on his shirt sleeve. Please, Baba, please was repeated like a chant as the bike set out in motion.

Mihir couldn’t see the scowl settle in his Baba’s expression. But he could sense the change in his temper in the way they sped up. His father’s hand was on the accelerator, he could see. Could feel how the bike lunged forward, wheels spinning furiously on the concrete. Dread dripped like molten metal in the pit of his stomach. Fabric bunched in his fists when he curled his fingers around his Baba’s shirt. When the wind slapped his face, he closed his eyes. I’m sorry, Baba. Please slow down, he had parroted, voice cracking.

The bitter voice of the tea seller pulls Mihir out of the memory. He blinks the past out of his eyes and sits up straighter. Feeling a tightness in his throat, he reaches for water and pushes it down to help his throat. Out the window, the board reads Faridabad. One more hour.

The chess game seems to have ended a few minutes ago; the boy is putting the pieces back in his little bag. His father, most likely, has stepped out on the platform. Mihir has a sudden, inexplicable urge to converse with the boy.

“Do you like chess?” Mihir speaks before he can stop himself.

The boy’s head rises up; he raises an eyebrow—probably surprised at being spoken to. “Yes,” he states. “Papa taught me how to play.” Mihir nods at the answer.

“Your papa looks kind,” he hears himself saying, and then cringes internally. What would a kid say to that? To his surprise, the little boy smiles and pulls himself up, as if getting in posture to talk about a video game he likes. “My papa is the best,” the boy announces with a confidence that Mihir wishes time never shakes up.

The boy’s father appears before the train sets forth in motion on the tracks again. He watches the father’s face visibly soften at the sight of his son. He angles his head away and looks out the window. It’s beautiful, Mihir thinks, the boy’s relationship with his father. Even though he has only witnessed a glimpse of it.

Somewhere, hidden under the awe, he feels the faintest hint of envy burn in his bosom. The very moment he realises it, it becomes impossible to overlook. All summer, while he was at home, he had barely looked his father in the eye. That was how it had been ever since he had started college. Mihir can trace back in his memory the suffocation he felt while being in the same room as him. The unspoken reminder that every breath he took, he somehow owed it to his father. Before leaving, he had told Ma he wouldn’t be home for as long next summer. Despite the dismay, she had understood.

When he thinks of his mother in that house, he feels agitated. Sometimes on the phone, when she vents to him about his dad, he bites his tongue. Swallows down the urge to tell her she chose this life—that she can still leave him. Anger, he thinks, is the easiest emotion for the heart to carry. It gives him something to do. Sorrow, on the other hand, feels almost passive. There’s nothing one can do but helplessly drown in the immensity of it.

As a child, Mihir too had believed that his Baba was the best. It feels absurd to think about now—how to him, the word father had meant something almost mythic. Someone who could do no wrong. Growing up, Mihir’s faith started to falter under the weight of all the ways his father had proved himself ordinary. His father had never claimed to be perfect; he had claimed otherwise quite strongly. It’s ridiculous, how he had clung to the belief for as long as he did. His Ma probably hasn’t let go of that belief either, he knows. Upon this realisation, he feels remorseful for the times he has let his frustration crack through his phone’s speaker.

He finds it unviable, how parents and children put each other on pedestals. How they idealise some version of the other and spend their whole lives resenting them for not measuring up. He’s been guilty of doing the same thing too. His Ma and Baba are humans, much like himself. They must feel scared too. But how conveniently he has ignored their humanity. The thought makes him uneasy.

Across from him, he watches the little boy nestled in his father’s lap, reciting some story about a classmate. Outside, night cascades on the horizon as the train approaches Delhi. Despite himself, he wonders- just how difficult would it have been for Baba to do the same?

Outside my window,

dawn rises back up in the sky

orange hues dissolving into their darkest blue.

Almost certain that insomnia has turned me mad, after all,

I unturn in bed.

From the window on the other side,

I unwatch the moon melt

and pool on the soil.

Hot, coal-coloured droplets

freeze when they touch my skin,

the nightsky leaks.

In the next room,

the record swallows the music back:

Dies everybody

river on the moonlight

there’s, home.

Unlidded eyes,

I wake into a dream—

I’m unkissing the apology off your lips.

My cashmere top floats up from the floor,

wraps me in its shape.

My mouth uncurves as it engulfs your name;

letter by letter, I unlearn it.

The end, is it?

Or just the beginning?

Who said there’s a difference?

The rust of leaves

breathes back into green

as they ascend and fix themselves onto trees,

where the songbirds

thread melodies into the air.

Out on the porch,

My skin absorbs the ultraviolet.

My hair is being unbraided in my mother’s hands.

Nothing bad has happened yet.

Think of it as

building a house back from ruins,

swimming through your mind,

searching for letters

that might cradle the ache

you rest in their curves.

Chisels in the left hands of all writers,

they try to carve out

the ugliest bits of the feeling.

Think of it:

Grief is a river I weep

on the bathroom floor.

A burning cigarette,

the reminder of time running out.

Faithlessness in the hues of green,

bled on the beds of reckless lovers.

The itch at the back of my throat

could be regret.

And love?

Love is the blade

in the trembling hands of a teenager.

Or maybe it’s something gentler

perhaps something the atoms vibrate with.

You see,

a collection of words cannot hold

what hearts are meant to.

When the door clicks shut after the

funeral,

and the apartment echoes

with the sound of keys

being dropped in the glass bowl,

there is no metaphor in sight

to soften the loneliness.

Or when, some moonlit night,

you hear the rustling of bedsheets

as your lover settles in their bed,

miles away.

to describe the loosening of the knot in

your chest

is like trying to catch moonlight

between your fingers.

The silver keeps slipping

through the gaps.

All my lovers had their hands on the doorknob. But that’s not how it started. No, it began with lilac skies and flushed cheeks, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup. mouths. his, mine, his on mine. warm breaths so close i couldn’t tell which one belonged to me.

And words. I missed you and please hold me and i breathe easier next to you. A tender feeling spreading in my chest like i’m dying.

But something’s wrong. His hand is reaching for the doorknob.

The dream breaks and leaks out of my eyes. There’s nothing i can do.

I’m sorry, look, i’m smaller now. Love me again.

II.

My heart inside your chest is trying to get out. It’s hammering against your ribs and your sternum splits when it breaks free.

I catch it, but something is wrong. It’s no longer mine. This heart—it bleeds out your colour. I’ve got grey all over my hands.

I don’t have the heart to tell you that the feeling is fading away.

The one when your touch used to tug at the loose threads of my being, and my seams would fall open in your hands.

That feeling, yes. It’s fading away.

III.

I’ve always found phone calls rather less appealing. The distance. The voice without the body. Not quite knowing what to say, or what to do with my hands.

That day, when we were talking, i was being bathed in golden light flooding through the window. I could hear you—your voice flowing from your mouth, through my speaker, finally resting heavy in my gut.

You were getting tired of me. I could feel it then. Maybe you already had.

Your hand was on the knob. I needed to make myself palatable.

My eyes were fixed on a Gulmohar tree, blurring and reappearing as they lost focus.

I let the words die on my tongue. How do i make my voice hold you so tightly it becomes obvious i don’t want you to go?

IV.

You know, I tried to kill myself in the womb. It’s a joke. Of course i didn’t.

But i had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. No—literally. I did. and it was tightening. and i couldn’t breathe.

I felt that same cord tangled around my throat when you told me you didn’t have the time. That familiar ache bloomed in my chest.

I’ve been slipping through hands for as long as i can remember. Oh why didn’t you hold me, baby?

I have a strange sixth sense about these things. My instinct catches the exact moment something starts to shift. But what was between us had started to moulder a while ago. I just didn’t want to name it. For weeks, I had been dressing up a corpse. I had been gentle with it, hoping in silent anguish that my tenderness might bring it back to life. But the stench of our dying love had already diffused into the air. There was a funeral awaiting.

We spoke, like usual, about things of little importance to the world. You told me about the documentary on butterflies you watched last week. I told you about how pheromones from a male butterfly can temporarily alter some regions of a female’s brain. It’s not as dramatic as “rewiring”, but close to neural modulation.

The corners of your lips turned up at this and you shook your head—in disbelief, maybe. Then you told me to get my head out of these books. That threw me off. I thought of something mean to say. It didn’t take long to find. The words were about to leave my mouth when you took your ring off and placed it on the table with a clink. And i was already being pulled in.

This was what you always did when you weren’t sorry enough to apologise. I wish you were sorry enough to apologise.

You weren’t there. Yet you were everywhere. A drunk stranger was kissing my shoulder, but he had your eyes— flecks of gold floating in brown pools. A crease beneath your left eye that i had memorised in mornings when the sun bathed your face in gold before you woke up. Time i had borrowed from our inevitable fate.

For some reason I began to think of that time in the shower when you washed my hair because i was too sick to get up. The ghost of your breath behind my neck. How your fingers hid in between the strands of hair and how it felt like all my pain was being washed away. You baptised me yours. It was an altar, right there— your hands, a sacrament.

I didn’t know how to love you without making it my religion.

The thing about a make believe God is that he, much like the real one, lets you down. Off my knees, i turned apostate that night when you pulled your body away from mine.

“I can’t do it. I’m sorry.” Your voice was breathless. “I slept with her, you know. I had to give it another chance. She’s my wife.”

I felt my stomach twist into knots. I had been watching you, ever since you tore your body away from mine. Registering every flicker of emotion on your face. And now you were looking at me— waiting for some reaction on my part. But my vision had blurred and unfocused. The wall behind you had come closer, the room felt smaller than before. You were dissolving into the walls.

“Say something. please.” You whispered.

I wasn’t punishing you with my silence— not intentionally, atleast. I just didn’t have anything to say. So you slept with your wife, big deal. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? It was inevitable. Fated.

Inside, some sick, twisted part of me felt smug about my instinct being right, too. I knew you were gone before you had even said anything.

“Did it feel like anything?” I finally asked.

I wasn’t sure why i asked that. It wouldn’t change anything, would it? What would it do if you told me that it didn’t mean anything? That you were thinking of me the whole time— her lips on your jaw, but i was on your mind. That you were looking for my warmth in her touch. Some moments of pride you would hand out to me in pity, as compensation.

But it wouldn’t change a thing. I had slipped out of your hands long before they slid down her back.

“Yeah, I’m sorry.”

Suddenly, my limbs felt too heavy, like they would tear open my skin and fall out if I didn’t anchor myself.

I can’t do it. Sorry. I slept with her.

Can’t touch you anymore now that I remember what she feels like.

Sorry. I had to give it another chance. She’s my wife.

My face felt hot, and the warmth of the air stung.

You were pretty enough to fuck. I didn’t think about much else. I’m sorry.

Sorry I couldn’t love you.

Sorry i have a life. Sorry you wouldn’t be a part of it.

Sorry you’re disposable.

Sorry you knew this already.

I had a sensation that my lungs were folding in on themselves.

The drive back to my place was soaked in silence. The streetlights flickered shadows on your face as you drove, and i was watching you fade. I kept thinking about the space between our mouths— this cursed space that seemed to stretch wider with every second. The metal glinted on your finger. I was thinking: you have a hole in your chest. It takes one to know one.

You’ll probably tell your wife about me, i thought. And she’ll pity me— after she’s done hating me. Young woman, unsure of what to do with her life, found a hurting, married man and tried to make him love her. Not out of malice— just to prove to herself that she’s capable of being loved. Of being held.

I didn’t see you again. But I looked for you in songs we used to listen to. In threads of old texts where warmth stayed preserved.

About that hole— you see, I reached inside, the left part of my chest, looking for a heart but I discovered a dark pit. I carry it around like a wound stitched to myself. I swallow love down my throat like pills to feel full. Once is never enough.

You know, when anglerfish mate, they melt into each other. The deep sea is so dark and vast that when a male locates a female, he latches on to her and starts to slowly disintegrate until their blood vessels merge. His eyes, fins and most organs shrink— or in most cases, disappear— until they share a bloodstream.

It’s terribly poetic, and it used to make me want to commit sins. Sins grave enough to make me reborn as a lesser creature. Maybe then i would love better.

I used to dream of a love so consuming that there’d be no self remaining. The borders between us would blur. The dreams playing behind your eyes would be my dreams. A cut on my skin, and your blood would gush out.

But that’s not love. It’s survival. To give yourself away, shrink to your core until there’s nothing left of you.

The parasite wearing the skin of love is still a parasite. I don’t wish for it anymore.

tell me about the time you sank your teeth

into love

and how its juice ran down your palm,

your wrist,

onto the soil—

crimson pooling on earth’s skin.

tell me how you swallowed it

and got sick after.

joke that sweetness never sits right in your stomach.

and like always,

i’ll laugh.

lover,

ask me about the time i buried myself alive

a borrowed bed beneath six feet of dirt.

i’ll tell you how love touched

what the sun couldn’t.

how it seeped through the mud

and unearthed me.

tell me the grit beneath my fingernails

is something you love

and like always,

i’ll believe.

lover,

tell me about the dream

where we let our irises collide

how i drink from your pools of honey,

before we unzip our skins

and step out

bracing for the other’s blade,

to slit and wound,

deeper than the ones before.

and how it never does.

show me your bare hands

swear there’s no knife waiting.

and like always,

i’ll put mine down too.

maybe it’s the romantic in me to blame for this, but i can’t help but think about how when you hand me half an orange- you are giving me the days it spent buried as a seed. you are offering me the sunlight that nurtured it, the water that sustained it in the same way that this unspoken moment of tenderness between us- which i might as well call devotion- nourishes my soul.

i pay close attention to how you peel the orange— always stripping away the white parts from it. it feels as though you’re baring me along with the fruit, stripping down my layers along with its. and how gladly i let you. the sun splits open when you split the orange in half, basking the room in its warmth and light. a smile lingers on your lips when you place it in my hand, and i swear, i can almost feel what holding love feels like.

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it comes effortlessly to you, and you hate that i make a big deal of it. but for someone like me, who has only ever believed that if heaven exists on earth, it is found in the warm embrace of your affection— it is a pretty big deal. i would let you carve your name into my ribs with a smile on my face for love you have blessed me with in this moment alone. this is how grateful i am.

in spanish, it is common to use the phrase ‘me media naranja’ to refer to a lover or a friend, which translates to “my half orange”. i have tasted love on my tongue every time we share a fruit. it’s the closest i have come to salvation.

love moves between us in many forms— in soft whispers before we finally give in to sleep, in slow morning kisses that say ‘thank you for waking up next to me’ and in the way your fingers trace over the hollow of my neck after we make love. but if i could choose, i would make a religion out of the way we share fruits.

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mother, there is a grave inside of me. of all the women you could’ve been. you heard your dreams shatter the first time you heard me cry. sometimes you tell me stories about your childhood and a knife i don’t remember being stabbed with twists in my stomach. i guess i was born with it. the same knife that killed your dreams, slit the throats of all the versions you could’ve become. mother, i wish i could save you. i wish you wanted to be saved.

mother, why do you despise me so much? do you see your reflection pulsing through me? painfully reminding you of all that you could’ve been? last night you showed up in my dreams— you were the same little girl i had seen in pictures. i hated myself too when i woke up. who wouldn’t hate a murderer? mother, why don’t you meet my eyes?

your hatred mothers me more than you ever do. it kisses my forehead and cradles my face as i weep like a child. it bruises my lip and stabs me soon after.

mother, my existence is like salt on your open wounds. my childhood was nothing but a long apology. i’m seven and i ask god what i have done wrong to deserve this? god doesn’t answer. but your sighs do. you look at me the same way you look at the mirror— despising the sight of what stands in front of you.

i am tired, ma. tired of carrying this grave. tired of washing the blood on my hands that doesn’t seem to go away. tired of mothering this ugly guilt that sleeps within me and will someday swallow me whole. tired of watching your jaw clench everytime you call me your daughter. tired of being all that i am and all that you wish to be. i would do anything. i would tear the flesh off my bones and place it in your hands if you ask me to. just— look at me. once. without hatred.

mother, i used to dream of a sunny afternoon where i don’t have to wonder if you love me. where i rest my head on your lap and your fingers thread through my hair. in my dream, i don’t flinch. instead, i close my eyes and pretend this moment isn’t impossible. isn’t out of reach. in this dream, i’m no longer a grave. you look at me with a softness i can only dream of. i no longer feel sorry for you. you’re no longer angry at me.

i wish it would come true.

thank you for reading