Aaditya Bajpai

  • I want to go back to the first day I saw a sunflower. I’d do many things differently.

    I remember the first day I saw a sunflower. Or maybe it was a streetlamp in July, drunk on the heat and guilt. Time folds weird when you’ve got regret in your mouth like old pennies. She—no, it—no, you stood in the middle of something golden and stupid and I thought, “This is what permanence must feel like.” But permanence is a lie with good lighting.

    I didn’t write the letters this time. I tied them to a pigeon’s wing, but the pigeon never came back. Maybe it read them. Maybe it burned them. Or maybe it was never a pigeon, just the part of me that wanted to confess and chew glass for forgiveness.

    Do you know how many syllables are in I’m sorry when you whisper it into a night that doesn’t want to hear you? More than language allows. More than my mouth can manage.

    I rearranged the clocks. Pushed the minutes back into their eggshells. Unsaid everything except the part where I watched you walk away like a promise I never earned. If I could, I’d pluck every second off the stem, eat the seeds raw, spit out time like venom, and begin again at the point where I should have stayed.

    I didn’t write the letters. I carved them into mirrors. They bled backwards. My hands still smell like ink and something heavier.

    I’d undo all of it. Every stupid metaphor. Every petal I mistook for truth. Every word I placed between us like a wall. I’d do anything to make it right, even if it means remembering the sunflower wrong, just so I could love it better.

    -aaditya

  • Oranges and You, Again

    I once sat by a broken clock that ran backwards and thought it was wiser than me. It hummed in rusted circles, and I, a fool with open hands, kept asking it for the right time. The trees around whispered sideways, and the river bent into knots, laughing with its back turned. I didn’t mind. I kept waiting.

    You were somewhere in the smoke, maybe dancing, maybe just breathing, maybe peeling sunlight off an orange, one slow curl at a time. I didn’t know. I just knew the sky had changed its spelling the day I saw you.

    Sometimes, I carry a basket full of rain to the hill where all the forgotten things are sleeping. I’d empty it there, thinking maybe you’d find a drop and recognise it as mine. Sometimes I planted chairs in the dirt, hoping one would grow into a table for two. Nothing ever sprouted, but I kept sitting anyway, waiting for the feast.

    The birds stitched holes in the clouds with threads of melted snow, and the ground became soft enough to write names in with my bare feet. I wrote yours until the letters got tired of standing straight and lay down to sleep. I didn’t mind. I kept walking.

    There are rooms in my heart where the windows are stuck half-open and the rain drips inside when it wants. I never fix them. Maybe one day, you’ll come and sit inside, knees tucked, shoulders warm, holding an orange between us, peeling it slowly, the juice running down our thumbs like tiny suns.

    And I will wait. Through every crooked hour, every river that forgets where it’s going, every chair that refuses to bloom, every letter that collapses into dirt.  

    It’s my 5th April, waiting for you. I will wait.  

    Just to share an orange with you.

    -aaditya

  • The Lamppost

    There is a lamppost on the corner of a road no one remembers being built.

    It stands with a spine bent slightly backward as if surprised to still be standing. The light it casts isn’t gold, not quite. It’s that color just before a dream ends but before you know you’re waking up. It doesn’t flicker but you imagine it would if you blinked at the wrong time. And it does blink, with the wind maybe or with the memory of someone once leaning on it, half drunk with hope or half sure it wouldn’t last.

    The evening folds in around it, the kind that doesn’t quite settle. That blue which still believes in the sun though the sun has long walked off. And in that bruise-colored hush, the lamppost is alone but not lonely. There’s a difference.

    Sometimes, you find yourself staring at it as if it might explain something. The way it holds light as though it’s been entrusted with warmth it didn’t ask for. As though someone once whispered to it, hold this, just for a little while, and forgot to return. You think maybe that’s what love is, the holding of something bright without knowing if anyone will come back for it.

    You walk past and it doesn’t call, not in words, but in a hum low enough to miss if you’re too sure of yourself. It hums like old lullabies in languages that didn’t survive. Grief maybe. Or memory. Which are not always different things.

    It never moves. Never grows. But still, somehow, it changes. And in that change, you see yourself, heart first and blurred. Because love leaves footprints. And grief walks in them barefoot.

    You don’t know why it matters. But the lamppost knows. And it keeps burning. Because to stop would mean admitting that some things don’t return. And maybe it still believes.

    Maybe so do you.

    -aaditya

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