This Museum Of Mine

By Juhi Gautam

I used to flutter through the wind

when they struggled to adorn me

with tousled alphabets.

I used to smirk at the touch

of those plump lips

and glimmering smutty eyes

and burst into fits

of laughter.

I am a letter, a handwritten one.

Not the kind your tutor makes you write, or the kind you type into your computer screens.

I am the letter

which has carried the news of love, of hate, of unprecedented breaks

in feelings of a lover

or emotions of a mother.

I welcome you, to my museum.

I am the timeless piece of

unworthy bilge,

they used to fling into the bin

because I now had a rival.

I could not automatically correct

the words they sewed with all their heart and suggest them sentences that were

grammatically on the mark.

I valued their feelings, that no one else heard, adored the disarranged words

and treasured the marks of lipstick stains. probably, this is why I was disdained.

I am the smell of those rusty letterboxes drenched in rain.

I am the smell of those henna-clad hands telling the story of separation and pain.

I, and a lot of others like me in this museum are symbolic of love, revolt and sacrifice, of the feelings burnt on funeral pyres. I carry a truckload of emotions

untouched by different potions

that erase the captured fingerprints and show stains of tears filled to the brink of the same glimmering smutty eyes.

So I stand here in this museum,

with a lot others like me

to narrate you a story

that would have burned in funeral pyres or asphyxiated in a closed casket.

If I weren’t here.

By Juhi Gautam