Act 1

By Misha Raj

I’m here again. Re-reading old poems. They stare at me with wide eyes. “Welcome back.” They say, “won’t you sit with us?” Rest your soul in these faded emotions. They’re still there. Settled in my mercury veins. Like old stains that never quite leave, no matter how much you rub at them. It’s frighteningly quiet today. The kind of silence that your mind feels obligated to fill with thoughts. It’s as if the world decided to take an intermission. The sun’s lying dead, behind this curtain of ghastly grey clouds. The wind’s whistling right into my bones. It’s saying, ‘look how hollow you are.” This one won’t feature in my top ten. It’ll stay here though - an embarrassing blight that I can’t seem to leave behind. They say awareness is a kind of narcissism. It guides your actions like an unrelenting bosun. I inhabit my body like it’s a glasshouse in the middle of a lightning storm. One foot out the door, but the other rooted firmly in the past. Sometimes my fingers don’t move when I ask them to. They’re like disconnected sausages,

twitching without purpose. Sometimes I don’t start writing, because I fear I won’t remember how to stop. I treat my thoughts like familiar strangers. They flow through me like a shoal of fish. Terrifyingly lucid, yet just out of reach. I know this face. This hair, those eyes, that mouth. So intimately, it feels alien. Sometimes the mirror clouds over, and I am grateful that I don’t have to see the carcass of the sun again. Step by step, I make these unfamiliar legs take me closer to the curtain. I take a deep breath. I’m almost there. Maybe this time I’ll make it out.

By Misha Raj