I Put Her So High on A Pedestal.

By Shanmukha Vitta

I put her so high on a pedestal,

her shadow stretched across my sky,

a monument to all I thought love could be,

so tall, I couldn’t see the crown.

They say I made her too much,

more than the sum of her edges,

but they didn’t see how her laughter

could turn silence into music.

They didn’t feel the weight of her gaze,

how it softened the sharpest corners of the day.

I miss her most in the quiet moments—

not the lover, but the friend,

the easiest rhythm of a shared world,

the language we spoke,

without needing words.

Now, they tell me: “She wasn’t so great,”

but they don’t know the height I saw,

the view from where I stood,

the way her light could make

the ordinary divine.

And maybe they’re right.

Maybe I built her too high,

but what they’ll never see

is that even now,

as I squint to find her crown,

the air up there still feels like home.

By Shanmukha Vitta