Subject: one last missed call

To: unclear

i. The day after New Year’s Day

– it’s so cold but you hand me your jacket in my mind, in my mind you don’t have a face and you’re not chivalrous. You merely want my smell wrapped in your clothes to take a fragment of me around with you. You know that’s the only way you can bottle snow up before it melts into a mess.

I could romanticize snow cones and globes with dancing people inside but my snow globes only had my grief inside and you simply wanted the music. Starting the year with resolutions is common for you because the glass is never half empty not half full. It’s just a glass. And it sits in front of you gathering dust everyday.

I never took your jacket. You were never a person.

ii. The first signs of spring

– so you’re telling me spring is a sign of rejuvenation? you’re telling me spring makes you feel alive inside and the birds make you feel like you can fly? but haven’t you heard of icarus and didn’t you know it was the sun which made him fall? but of course, he’s just the subject of countless poems and stories and the ultimate moral of a story, isn’t he.

“Don’t fly too close to the sun” they say, shaking their heads. But i found icarus the other day, did you know he could swim? He never really died. He swam across the sea and found a river to swim in everyday, but people just need an excuse to blindly turn you into myths and morals because the reality wouldn’t serve as daily bread in their conversations

Icarus visits me everyday. Ironically, he loves hot milk with his daily tea.

iii. a hot summer day in kolkata

– my sweat drips off your chin while i try to look at the mountains in your eyes. You told me recently that you love to feel the warmth of the sun against your skin, even if it burns you. I was never a sun. At most, I was a star tucked among millions of other stars, never quite twinkling but always on the verge of collapsing into a black hole.

We drank aam pannas while talking about the mediaeval culture, but my rage filled up our words while yours struck out. I’ve never been afraid of my own voice but you never believed in losing. Maybe Icarus falling down was never a race but was always perceived as a competition between his life and his will to fly. I don’t think you understand that it was only when he flew, that he was truly alive. Sometimes falling is worth it if you can be alive for a second.

iv. The first drops of rain

– you never liked the rain. You never liked the songs I liked too. While i would listen to “ami sunechi sedin tumi” with the rain falling against my window, and dream about the sound of rain falling on pavements and paper boats made in a hurry, you’d curl up in a corner and sleep until the rain passed.

My paper boats were never temporary but you never did notice them, not even when you fell asleep on one. I could’ve woken you up, yes. I could’ve proved that my paper boats do not sink because you were yourself sitting in one, floating off to your imaginary land. But I never did, and maybe that is my fault. Although, now that I think about it, would it really have been too much trouble to believe that my paper boats can swim? Because you see, in the end, I left you on the shore with my buoyant boats and you watched me drown in one.

v. I’ve run out of seasons because there’s no colour in them anymore.

You put all the blame on me and I take it because I believe you too. Maybe if you could understand why my stars and paper boats could never withstand natural calamities, you’d understand why I build my own storms and destroy my own towns. Maybe you’d understand why I never let you enter my city and why the only resident is me, myself and I. Why I uprooted my home the moment you said your trees were dying because there wasn’t enough sunlight. My house was blocking it.

Maybe you’d finally understand how it was never really about us because the world isn’t that small and the rivers and glaciers always move to cause an avalanche. Why one ripple could’ve caused an earthquake and destroyed your precious beer glass collections, your snow globes, your jackets. So excuse me for never making that one last missed call, because it was never the intention to bring about an eclipse to your possible sun.