The Love We Once Had

By Aarshia Ray

Am I wearied down by loneliness,

Or am I a lover of solitude?

Through attachment with detachment,

And the other way round just as same,

Life flows on, mortal spirit,

Traversing truculent troubles,

And little lanes of meaninglessness.

I fashion myself a wanderer,

A loner hiking up the hills

Of meagre understanding,

Aloof of company, a friendly face

Is unknown to me; I was born

To be lost in the merry fields

Of tumultuous Life: a jealous friend indeed,

For it gave me no other company

Other than worries of its own.

The idea of freedom endears me.

But I ask myself sometimes,

Would I choose boundless freedom

If it came at the cost of loving hands

Wrapping their length around me

And pulling me into the cage of abstract care?

Two souls will choose freedom:

One who is unknown to care altogether,

Who lacks the taste of softening eyes,

Worried rebuke, and undervalued silence,

Silence which speaks of everlasting trust.

Another soul knows positive history:

So strangled by the inexhausting knots

Of affectionate threads, they crave themselves,

They crave to know who they are.

Like every ordinary person, I admit

I fall in neither category.

My childhood remembers familial love,

As I grew, the list declined, subtly,

Like a thief sharpened in the skill of stealth,

Time robbed me of love gradually;

Till the number of people who care if I live,

Reduced so that I could count in one finger,

And I know, that privilege shall cease too

Taken away with age and wrinkles

On my now-firm skin.

Sometimes I wish I had died

The minute I was born:

Loved by all, hated by none,

I would be stranger to death

And suffering of the only people

I have ever loved.

Being witness to pain is worse

Than pain itself.

It’s natural, they tell me,

Man and Woman will be born,

Will suffer and will die.

But this naturalness is unsettling.

It pains to be in the shackles

Of bountiful, merciless nature.

All souls who have known love,

Would happily be caged in foolish care,

Because they remember, they remember hearts

Like a vague memory, an old photograph

Yellowed with time; they spend their days,

Trying to bring back the life they once had.

We aren’t looking for a destination,

We are on the mission to find ourselves

Whom we lost in the evolutionary process

Of keen kid to careless teen to adult world;

We are all conspiring to return to our foundations,

We are all trying to find the love we once had.

By Aarshia Ray