Wishful Thinking

I laid awake all night wishing upon the dead stars for the tectonic plates to move, the earth to shift shape, the world of the unimaginative to create magical horcruxes and my heart to relapse out of the big black hole again.

The night remained still and so did I.

"Was that all you did last night?"

Most nights.

"I had imagined so many versions of you, after me, secretly and selfishly hoping, atleast one of them showed you this very way. Still and colourless without me."

Then you'd be happy to know, that's exactly how life felt after you. As if you were a torrent that passed my town, without prior notice and I no more knew what civic planning would rearrange it back to its exactness again. So, I spent days, months, planning and replanning. Building each feeling, synapse by synapse. Painting them down with every colour I could borrow from the fleeting skies. I took my time. But here I stand. Not the same I was, but fully functioning nevertheless. 

"I didn't leave, you left. Remember?"

I was persuaded to. I wouldn't have flinched if the entire world had asked me to leave but you stood by my side, fighting for me. For us. But I was persuaded by you. Your eyes asked me to stay. Your silence asked me to leave and never turn back. Why didn't you fight for us?

".........."

There it is, that's why I had to leave. You left me no choice. I never knew if you'd miss me or you even cared..

"I always did.."

Not enough.

"So you left and turned me into your muse? I see you have written walls of poetry, about me. Us."

You were always my muse. I just wished, you weren't just that. I wished you'd lay by my side, under the stars, while I read you every metaphor and simile I have written you into. Smiling, looking into my eyes, deeply enriched with conviction. Obnoxiously feeling your smile waxing into a full moon. 

"That'd have been beautiful."

I know. But life now is not lacking of beauty either.

He renders me amazed with his charms. I never thought he would, but he is growing on me. He makes me laugh..

"You have a contagious laugh."

He says so too.

"Does he make you happy more than I did?"

Maybe just enough.

"Just enough to..?"

To know he cannot be persuaded away from his conviction for me. To know, he already pictures me alongside him, in the frame hanging down his living room wall.

"I pictured us too.."

Maybe not vividly enough, to rise to the occasion. 

"What does it mean for us then?"

When was there an us, to begin with?

You were always an incomplete figment of my dream, from which I frantically woke up every time you chose silence over my hand.

And tragically, you chose to remain so.

Our story never got the chance to be written into a prologue.

"Then why are you sitting here, writing about me, on the morning sand, at the beach? You still wish for our story to rewrite, to continue, to reach its epilogue, don't you?"

Maybe. That'd call for you to walk onto the shores, under the morning sun, come up to me and not fragment away with the wind, after I open my eyes.

Can you do that?

"..........."

As I assumed. Maybe that's why I write you down here, every morning, on the gullible sand. Where if my words do not come to life, the ocean washes you away as if you never existed to begin with.

And I walk away telling myself, that maybe my metaphors didn't have enough magic in them to personify my poetry into you.

"What if I did show up one day?"

Then my 8 year old self would feel extremely happy and validated.

 She always believed in magic.

~ u.m