Bullshit

Bullshit

Aayati Sengupta

Time has not been kind when it comes to you. In rage, with bitterness in my mouth, I have spat your name out often - at the road, the television, the cars that pass me by (how dare they leave me behind).

I have ached and twisted and carried venom of my own making inside my mouth. This is a story that ended a long time ago but I drag it on. Useless/ without anything to keep your mind engaged you create these dialogues/ when will you let it go man? My nails dig into my palms; I scream at you till you cut me off.

We are in different cities now but poison still flows through telephone wires. Your new one is frustrated, you are frustrated, I am not having the time of my life. Why do we do this over and over again? In the movies, by now they could have cut you, us, out of my mind. If I edged toward violence, there would be sirens at your front door while they brought your lifeless body out. If this were poetry, we would have transcended our bullshit by now.

Instead, I struggle every day as I confront both love and violence when I think of you. To me, you will always be best friend, I had thought.

Some memories are like fungi-eaten leaves. Sunlight through dark spots. In those hollowed out spaces, there is place now for my present to begin. In the sunlit remnants, there is my peal of laughter as you tackle me from behind, both of us running, playing tag, your arms and body a protective cage around me as we both fall.

My story with you in it is not just my story. The violence is not just mine, it is yours too. In my misunderstood moments, there is also your youthful figure standing at the door, misunderstood. Maybe the world cannot accommodate two sides at once. Maybe we will always have to look at one thing and then another, maybe I will always have to look from me to you or you to me. Vision, like colours, is a spectrum. It is not a merged, unified whole and because of that, I will always escape you, much like you will always escape me. My past and its insensible pull will always escape me, the future will escape me, I too will escape myself. Except through these fragments that I write, the photos that I

25 Chaicopy | Vol. III | Issue I

take, the pieces of myself that I leave as impressions with everyone that I meet.

As for you, my venom dissolves.

26 Yours Truly