(Assume All Trigger Warnings)
Summer afternoons have always been too salty, A kind that squeezes up your throat in a way, that it even forgets to heave the last sigh of existence. It takes me back to that day when I first tried to run away, The day when I first heard the sound of my heart dropping, A sound below 20hz, A sound incomprehensible by normal human beings- A sound overwhelmed by the screams discoloring the the four walls that just stopped being-home.
I remember The pink scarf, the rusty road with scratches that went too deep. Pink is my mother’s favorite color, there was a time when it used to match her cheeks. Ironically, it is also the color of the rose I plucked for some secret teenage affair, I choked it through my own fingers, my palm is yet not red from its blood, it just lies with no breath.
I am a murderer, I have killed A chubby child with a noisy laugh, A headstrong teenager with a tongue sharper than the comments on a girl’s skirt whose period started in the middle of her maths class. I have pulled away even before reaching the edge, wondering, what if the end tempts me more than the beginning ever did. I have shushed resistance with adjustments, Fisted palms scripted with words that never left my fingers and, called it all a part of my self-defense. Maybe, if I had used my hands to defend than to close my mouth, She wouldn’t have those blue-black ridges highlighting her arms, that have carried the load of five adults with zero help.
Now, I write poems to apologize to all the women I ever did wrong, My poems scream words that I never dared to enunciate, My therapist tells me to practice spelling out S-T-O-P I-T every day, The words that I should have yelled that day.
Isha Adhikari