Melancholies

By Tanvi Hegade

Everything,

Not quite everything anymore.

And a little more of all the nothing pressing in on me.

It's funny, almost, how your absence is more present than your presence ever was.

Hollows forming on my skin, resembling tiny craters at all the spots you left traces of you..

I stretch my hand out

and

even the air seems to be dented with

your absence.

Melancholies

The man I want is a man who's only just picked himself up from amidst the wreck that is his past: what was once all that he knew has come crumbling down. The man I am getting to know is a man who is still wading through the scattered oysters of their memories. He's only half out of the water, some of him still submerged deep.

I pluck each flower of grief from his hands, his fingers, tuck one behind my ear. With the one growing between his shoulder blade and the nape of his neck, I fashion an anklet. They've all fallen to the ground where he stands, a cascade of wilted lilies. I overlay the wreathe of his sorrows over mine, thinking that at least somewhere, we merge.

That perhaps, if I tend to our griefs together, he will be absolved of his heart having to break every time he is reminded of her. I try to become the ocean he can swim to, for there is no solace to be found in the quicksand of his river.

I make a whole ceremony out of his burying the ghost. I douse myself in his melancholy, set myself on fire. I gather the moonlight sliding from between my fingers, try and soothe the sting of all that he remembers. So that maybe, maybe there will be space for me. Someday, perhaps?

But between us, grief shared is only grief distended.

By Tanvi Hegade