Geography

After a hundred tomorrows from today, your memories will still buzz like fireflies inside my bones, struggling to escape the dragnet of my marrow.

You will rise in my dreams, your details finer and magnified. I will think about you once again when the raindrops will make love to the window pane, and my bohemian soul will be drunk on the wet scent of the mud.

Yesternight, I spoke to grief when I thought about how I wanted to hang a paper lantern crafted out of gossamer on the bent tree branch with you. Grief pressed its cold lips against my forehead when I thought about the stone cottage with an archaic ebony door, and the pathway lined with white orchids and lilacs and bluebells in the middle of the forest beside a sparkling lake on a mountain.

It took me a while to realize why grief was so quiet last night— No paper lantern of gossamer. No stone cottage in the middle of the forest. No, you. No us.

You need to grow up alone. I understand.

I tell tales about how people can experience eternity with someone even in a brief, singular moment. I had experienced you. I had loved you. Even after a thousand tomorrows, the ink in my veins will write poetries about you on the anatomy of my existence.

Sometimes, we don't choose the tale we want to tell. The tale chooses us.

You chose me. Let me tell the world your story. Let me tell the world how embers of enflamed passion were caught in the storm of our velvet breaths when two eternities had made love to each other on that summer night. Let me tell the world that your soul is made up of satin and adventures.

I know you're not magic. I know you're not Haley’s comet. I know you're just flesh and bones. Like me. Like all of us.

But you've become a memory that won't decay even after the time when my bones will be powdered into ashes, and flesh blended with the fine grains of the dust.

Your name will be the eulogy on my tombstone. You've become that holy. I can almost run my fingers against the texture of it.

Two continents apart. Soon enough.

We will watch different sides of the sun. We will watch different puffs of the floating clouds. We will walk under different parts of the inky sky. We will breathe under different stars. We will know the different faces of the moon.

I'm afraid. I'm afraid that your mind holds the memories of me very loosely. I'll slip away soon enough into oblivion. I'm a transient occurrence. I'll shred into the emptiness.

Does Australia ever think about India? Sigh.

But I will remember everything. Stark, microscopic details— I'll think about how I had watched you sleep. I'll think about how you would talk to me about flying airplanes. I'll think about that evening date where I had secretly sent a prayer to my guardian angel asking him to freeze time for me. I'll think about that 3 AM when you had come to take me away with you.

You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Our life together was the most beautiful dream I had known. The existence of two continents is the most beautiful heartache I've ever survived.

I've lost my faith in Geography. Geography is the worst truth about life.