Fallow

By Upama Bhattacharjee

I don't remember your voice

when the room goes quiet.

It comes in flashes,

in the swell of a bustling crowd,

when echoes of shouted names

get trapped in the humid air

between bodies—lovers, strangers, friends—

(such a fine line between them all)

in the sheer physicality of existence.

I turn, into and away,

because something in a name I don’t recognize,

something about its shape against the mindless hum,

drags me back to you,

to how you whispered my name when it got late,

when I got quiet.

We held each other

on the edge of love for that one second—

you jumped,

but I took the fall.

I don’t remember your hands

when mine are empty.

They return

when mine are full of today:

the spine of a book folding into my palm,

a teacup cradled on a wintry evening,

a lover nestled against my shape,

sleeping soft.

You tuck away strands of hair

when that song comes on the radio.

My thoughts slip—

but soon with the weight of today,

the phantom house unbuilds itself,

the child with your eyes is never born.

Something in my smile, stolen from you,

crystallized, cold,

grows colder still.

I don’t remember your face

in the loneliness of a party.

But I catch you

in the softness of a song you cannot hear,

in the slip of a dry joke

that makes me startle, half-smiling,

half-hopeful,

that fate had predestined this for once.

A skipped beat—

your wicked smile

in yet another half-lover.

You stare at me through his eyes,

in the glow of a joke I won’t remember tomorrow,

in someone who doesn’t know

the weight of silence.

And yet,

the crinkle near his eyes—

I excuse myself for a drink,

and hear you laughing.

You know I don’t drink after midnight.

I don’t remember much of who I am,

who you were,

or what is to be made of the mess of us.

Only the in-betweens, unfinished thoughts,

the worst of what could have been.

And maybe forgetting

is just another kind of remembering—

a desperate kind of survival because cowards

do not get to win.

You linger everywhere I don’t look,

in everyone I don’t love,

everything I almost had.

And so, on quiet nights

made of almost-sleep,

I whisper your name to the dark—

(it is all I have)

just

to hear what’s left of it.

By Upama Bhattacharjee