My Room

By Arpita Guru

I am a little intoxicated - 

Intoxicated with grief, 

The kind of grief that is laced all around my heart, 

Making it all jittery and pulsating tremors of pain - 

The pain that makes me cut out pieces of myself - 

The pieces of guilt, loss, agony, abandonment, 

The pieces that wrench me from within. 

Yes, I know that excessive consumption of it can be harmful, Yet I ignore the warning and open the lid of the bottled-up grief; My heart cries and pleads, 

But I don’t stop, 

I cannot stop - such is the effect of the intoxication, 

That it makes me all fidgety and restless till the bottle is emptied, And I smash it down breaking into pieces, 

And I remember the pieces that I had cut from my heart. 

My tired eyes are now shedding waters of that grief, 

And looking at all the scattered pieces in front - 

Where each piece tells a different story of a different hustle - some with a  story of overcoming and some in the process; 

The pieces even if glued together carefully may not result in a finished product,  But, they carry in it the power with which they strongly contained the grief, Just like our heart that so resiliently held all the emotions within. 

The cut-out parts may not fit again, but – 

They are the stepping stones to rise above, 

They are the pedestals of our life that show the hustler we are, the fighter we  are, 

And, we will fill in the voids left in our heart with new pieces of strength and  positivity, 

That are further going to harbour some new stories - the stories of our making; For grief is a witness to our growth, 

For grief forebears that journey of our making.

By Arpita Guru