Of Love, Loss and Growing Apart

It is raining. Soft water droplets stick to my cheeks as if they’d never let go. The sun never shone with such love before, cheating the liquid coolness away from my skin. Eyes shut you sniff at the wet leaves and their slight fragrance makes your eyes rain in tandem. 

Have you ever tasted the rain? Have you ever gulped it down as if you’d been thirsty since birth, thirsty until it touched your lips? Has a single raindrop ever made love to your sun and burst inside in thousands of rainbows?

Walk with me and we’ll watch the ever changing images of life, painted pasts of little tragedies. Remember the first time you fell and scraped your knee? When you cried and cried as if that was the end of it all? You don’t. Or maybe you do and laugh it away like you laugh away every naive sweet aspect of yourself. How far have you grown?

Have your roots dug in deep, mingling with the throbbing earth? Do they breathe like soft earthworms? Do they churn quiet storms under the feet of all who walk in? Or are your roots floating in the wind, straining to leave you behind? But they can’t. I somehow imagine them carrying you along, your toes barely touching the ground. You breathe bubbles of clouds which rain. They rain soft water droplets which stick to my cheeks.

A little child peeps out of the wooden window of my dream. But then, dreams evolve and flow for they are the ever changing water of experience. You know it is one massive river, the fresh water of generations. You know it is a well, still and deep, dark as a moonless night, and dark as the spring afternoons when we tend to sense loss.

Do we know? Do we know before death and after? A flower for death is where we’ll stop. A flower for the grave of time, a flower to kiss the wind of death’s ashes.  Sometimes I wonder where you’d rest. Sometimes I wonder whether I will, ever. Sometimes all I want to do is rest my lips against your shoulder and talk gibberish.

When I was a child, I drew a world with a tiny hut and coconut trees and snow capped mountains and fishes in the sky and the sun in the pond. When I was a child, I ran after crows which stole my food and screamed myself hoarse.  When I was a child, I slept safe in a world where the rain and the sun and the cold meant happiness. When I was a child, I talked of the living dead on the river bed, standing with their heads buried in the sand.

When you were a child, you were not me. But I’m sure you painted your world and we shared certain dreams.

You feel my eyes on you but you don't turn around. I wish you wouldn’t be so distracted with the dewy grass growing between your toes. I wish you would stop growing away from me. Perhaps, you’ll slowly disappear in the sun, evaporate and fill all the spaces I could never define. Perhaps you’re here and you will be. Perhaps, I’ll call your name and you’ll hear. Perhaps I am you. Perhaps you are me.