Fundamentals Of A Sector-Enclosed Romance

By Jasmeet Dosanjh

Marble-cake apartments. White. The set.

My gift to you: ribbed summer polo slim-fit

a quick devotional pick from h & m. I told you it was on the way. 

It was another Friday I had decided to be good and love you in exchange for nothing. 

I was stuck to the telephone waiting for your nicotine-drop so for a short surge you’d reach out. I will be, 

stone-like, sticky on an aqua-tile merged with the yellow brow of a painted daisy. My bathroom is an extension of what I believe to be my accurate body.

You make my house a hotel-room. 

Nervous and charged to go out in fresh clothes and gel-curls.

Fundamentally the difference is this-

your god is dead.

my god abandons.

You have learnt to converse with the city skyline and its anxious coiling smash of roads. You eat frothy eggs and a cereal-cup for breakfast and are immediately full.

I peel a sugar crystal from my moonlorn lips and set it on fire. To see

if a soul spumes out. 

Tea is earthly business. My skin sucks

at anchoring. It spools in. It is sticky. It liked the continuous enveloping feel of your cells. 

You are fixed on the map. Glued to you I hypnotized myself into the promise of pleasant acceptably quaky rollercoaster life.

Your atlas I could swallow, could enter. The floating forms

I could almost touch.

Deflagellated and folded neatly into my city-costume. 

Our sector a sublime amorphous square. Every night casino night

with you. You taught me

The fullness contained in an apple. The infinite bliss of focusing in on an object and making it part of you. 

The green bench was my scene. You the character. I the tale.

Wondering still- how my glass body solidified in your arms. In my youth I was looked through. You came in the interlude- that is the only time I lived.

So I can delete it or let it replay. My only exciting file.

A coded recurrence in flashes- Vadilal binge night 

your ice-cream slicked and cold lips my plate.

You my object. I imbibe, before you morph

into god at the door, back turned.

Selective ceremony of your ritualistic love- hello was an opening into. A fidgeting. New discovery. Goodbye was quiet

as the flutter of a white moth against my cheek. Or a dandelion I imagined life into.

Sometimes more reviving than your numb encapsulation of my devitalised form. You remained on my skin while I travelled.

On Saturday was our only goodbye. The rarity finalised it. In screenwriting (life) a scene is most charging and event-turning when it happens only once. I broke the chain.

In shackles your mistresses came out of hiding and danced on me. I told you,

I will kill myself, and I had meant to.

You spat and squelched a discarded lookalike of me as it sat by your jeep’s wheel black and hungry as the sun at night. You called my mother.

Made me apologise.

I was done with your drink and rage that had spoiled me in my tender stage. Locked me a stunted foetus in a pickle-jar. Connected to your breath I simulated

a faint pastel reality.

I’m sorry I said I’d kill myself. What I’d meant was-

I’m snipping this life-cord snaking out of my belly plugged into

the least animal part of you.

By Jasmeet Dosanjh