I believe the time has come. The syllables that once stuck out of my brain disparagingly, have slowly submitted to the flames of occupational monotony. My words are all heavy, they carry their definitions like a burden; no elegance; like a verse read once too often. Rhyme schemes on graph sheets is not a good professional attitude, my laptop is filled with documents with poetic headlines; only. Any ache in the gut makes itself scarce after the first line, the pain has made peace with my body now, there is no place for you in my locked drawer anymore. I always wanted to chart my life with the poems I have written, but now I fear to lose out on the years, I have no poetry to account for. It is ridiculous how I expected the words to just keep coming to me like data finding the right loops back to the source; emotions are entropic and thus poetry.
I don’t want to open you in these parting moments, my language’s biography of me; every blue, grey, white, pink, turquoise, black sketched in metaphors; these seams that seem to rip my lines apart now, needn’t be reminded of times when the words fell in place and stayed there. And I don’t see this as giving up, maybe one day when the sun wakes up drenched in enough dew to shine rainbows on a summer morning, the ink in my pen will soak your pages again. Maybe at 2am, the project reports will blur my vision enough to be able to find meaning in the spaces between the numbers or the fan will rotate just fast enough to sweep away the layer of dust that shrouds the furnishings of my mind. But today you must depart from your hideaway.
From one locked drawer to another back at home, the journey of personal history must occur, perhaps to reorient the air around these young lines; twelve-year-old Sanjana wouldn’t be proud. But from this point onwards I want you to stop being the haunting red light of ‘It’s been months since you have written’ and instead be ‘Writing, like everything else, is best done at its own pace’. So, if I end up not being able to map my life in poetry, maybe I will just be one, with words a little too childish and pauses a little too long.
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