Blending In

By Ipsita Banerjee

I never smiled much

blending into furniture,

invisible girl hovering, in a party

neither the life nor the soul;

my words often fail to translate

across the cacophony, specially

for people that are meant to matter

the people I think I care for.

When trying to explain

my thoughts, I’m greeted with blank stares

nothingness cursing me back

into voids in my childhood:

I’m a ghost haunting my own house,

My daughters say when I smile,

occasionally moving my lips upwards

It seems I am at a funeral.

A funeral it is, then. Not the burning,

the removal of an earthly body

on darkened flames. Like a wake

held fourteen days later.

There are prayers to be said

and rituals, of course, the dead

have to be folded away, their lives

desecrated with garlands.

Someone told me, to be anything

you first have to be.

I am loneliest when I am not alone,

lost, uninhabited and rejected

even when surrounded

by friends, smoke, music, noise,

pretending to be human,

watching the tide sweep in.

At least when I’m lonely I am myself,

talking to my ghosts, quietly not watching

smiling but not quite smiling,

odd and ill-represented, but still there.

By Ipsita Banerjee