Sometimes I stand in front of walls and beg them to echo, not because I want to hear anything back but because I want something to break that isn’t me. I pour ink in my coffee hoping it’ll taste like something truer than water and regret, but it only ever spills into silhouettes shaped like her laugh. I kept thinking if I shut my eyes tight enough, my mind would forget the self I became around her, but the effort was only there on paper.
And so I tried, didn’t I? Tried to dress my own silence in metaphor, parade it around like look, here, here is poetry that doesn’t depend on the ghost of her shoulder. But every time I wrote “I,” it turned into something half-formed, half-felt, half-ashamed of its own self. My voice wore her perfume. My metaphors dragged her footsteps behind them. Even my empty lines had her breathing between them.
I carved temples out of sentences and put mirrors where altars should be, thinking maybe if I saw myself blurry enough, I’d believe it was art. But no chorus followed. No thunder cracked. Just the quiet guilt of knowing I had always been a vessel for someone else’s wonder. She was symphony. I was scaffolding. Even my breaking wasn’t beautiful enough to draw blood from anyone but myself.
I’m tired of writing her with reverence and myself with ellipses. Of pretending I can fill a page when all I’m doing is bleeding onto it hoping no one notices the shape is still hers. I made her immortal in metaphors. I buried myself between the margins. And when I tried to write a line about loving myself, it came out hollow.
Once I held a mirror to my chest and asked it to name me. It cracked. Said I was too much reflection and too little presence. Said my heartbeat stuttered in paragraphs. Said I was living as the afterthought of a girl I couldn’t stop mythologizing.
I laughed. Told it I never learned how to hold a pen unless it was to paint her into someone worth reading.
Maybe this is what it means to fail quietly. To want to be seen and only know how to make someone else visible. To want to be muse and artist and end up being neither; just an echo with semi-decent handwriting.
I screamed into a void once and it whispered her name back. Not because it missed her, but because it didn’t know who else I could be.
I tried to be my own muse once. But I only knew how to sculpt her out of my ruin. I can write her in a book. But I can’t even write myself in a word.
–aaditya.
Aaditya Bajpai 