Meeting Your Six-Year-Old Self

By Komal Aandhiwal

You laid a cherry blossom blanket for me.

I love a pink earth, you remember well.

Dead flowers are still beautiful,

but what about dead dreams?

‘They just haunt, so you can live’.

I meet you at the trampoline park,

by that bench you’ve always cherished.

What I could never count on fingers, i got.

Memories, tears, papercuts and heartbreaks.

Poems and hugs. Lost people, Blessings found.

Silenced voices, echoing silences.

Mouths that had no right to ask.

Ears that had no business to listen.

You say, store them in grandma’s pickle jars, so I did.

They are fragile, aren’t they?

‘Which ones?  ‘All of them’

You meet me with summer hands,

Your tongue aged from candy chuckles to rebellious angst,

but your eyes are still the same. 

And my heart’s stuck in fall.

You went from collecting movie ticket stubs to saving on pay checks,

Bills to pills, (not) losing your will (to live) to die.

Postcards are asking for new addresses, I have a few they don’t recognize.

(They don’t exist)

I meet you again after what seems like a second, but a decade has passed.

This time at my office’s parking lot.

I’ve written letters to you, 

I never could muster up the courage to drag my feet to the mailbox. 

I lied. I didn't want you to read.

Your voice aged from rebellious angst to regrets,

like carpenter ants, that gnaw your blood and bones 

like sweet, longed death, but your eyes are still the same.

Stealing glances from life like an adventure,

My heart is still stuck in the fall.

When you hear a fleeting monitor beep out of routine,

your blood can’t help but age to a fatalistic winter.

‘Tomorrows are but unknown angels waiting at your threshold, 

yesterdays are but known devils, they’d never want to give you away’

And your tongue ages backwards in desperation

from life lessons to feet stomping in rain puddles.

A grandfather’s broken pocket watch

becomes the only thing you hang on

to for dear life, ironically something dead.

You attempt to live on cold broth and flashbacks,

fragments of it. ‘They just haunt, so you can live’

until the monitor stops beeping, that is.

All of it, rolling effortlessly from your tongue.

Your eyes are still the same.

Summer hands. White wintery blood.

A heart stuck in fall, hanging on to a thread

waiting to be cut loose.

All of it, rolling effortlessly from your tongue,

as you brush off the last crumbs of my cookie from your hands.

I tuck a corner of your napkin, as if our meeting now is a prayer.

‘I’ll meet you again, this time at the back alley,

by the road that takes you to your mother’s grave’

You gesture me to leave, I don’t know where I came from.

I don’t know where to go.

By Komal Aandhiwal