I kept writing, like the page remembered her better than I did, like every line was a hand reaching for her in the dark. Even when I called it fiction, it wasn’t. Each poem a quiet unveiling, not of who she was, but of how she felt. My poetry was never just words, it was the canvas where I kept painting her, again and again, until the page began to look like love.
–aaditya
There is a part of the sky that forgot how to move the day she looked at me like I was more than a flicker. It stiffened right above the fifth cloud where the weight of her name still sits on my chest like wet linen. The sun still wakes up but the light feels synthetic like someone drew it on a screen and forgot to switch it on. The clouds try to dance but I know they are lost. They spin in circles like they too are looking for her. Nothing up there changes anymore. They are all pretending.
Before her I read the sky like scripture. Rain meant sadness. Thunder meant guilt. Sunsets were guiltier. The light used to confess things I didn’t have the courage to say. But now even the storms feel fake. The moon peeks out like it’s unsure of its own glow. Maybe even the stars have stopped trying because they saw her once and understood they could never outshine something like that.
Someone told me skies change because time moves. But what if time gave up when her fingers brushed mine that evening. What if time bent its knees and stayed still. What if every second since then has been the same second looped. I walk through days like they are mirrors reflecting the moment she said my name like a prayer she didn’t believe in. I don’t think I’ve aged. I think I’ve just dried out in the silence.
There is a color I see now it isn’t blue not really but something bruised like a memory that got stuck in the throat. It bleeds behind my eyelids when I close them. It hums under my skin like a cold echo. It’s in every sky since her. The color refuses to leave even when it rains. Especially when it rains.
I tried making the sky new again. I painted mornings with borrowed light. I begged sunsets to give me something else to look at. I screamed into the wind hoping it would rearrange the clouds into something unfamiliar. But every horizon carries her outline. Every shadow is a repetition of her shoulder. The whole sky is a shrine now and I am the fool kneeling in it asking for nothing but more of the same ache.
People say skies don’t remember. That they move on each morning and begin again. But mine wore her once and that was enough. It wrapped her into its folds and said this is it we’re done evolving.
And I look up not to hope not to wonder but to witness. Because the sky may change for them. But for me it hasn’t moved since the moment I met her.
-aaditya
I spoke to the spaces between words today because they felt more honest than what I’ve become. I keep retracing conversations like they’re constellations, trying to find the shape of what broke us, but maybe it was never one shape; maybe it was a shifting thing, maybe I was the shift. Or maybe silence crept into the cracks I pretended didn’t exist, and I fed it too long, mistaking quiet for peace.
You once said you liked the rain but hated getting wet, and I laughed like that was a metaphor and not a warning. Now I stand in every storm without an umbrella, thinking maybe this is penance or poetry, or some fusion of both where neither makes sense. I keep thinking of your voice at 2:07 a.m., how it could ask, “Are you okay?” like it had already cradled my answer. Now I only ask myself that in the voice you left behind.
There are hours I scream internally in Morse, in backwards scripts, in letters never sent and messages unsaid, hoping you catch the wavelength of guilt I broadcast. I don’t even know if it was one thing or many tiny careless ones—like paper cuts from pages I didn’t bother to turn.
And if time’s supposed to heal, why does it ask for more of me every day? Why do I keep rehearsing apologies in mirrors too tired to reflect anymore? I’m not asking for yesterday; I’m not asking for forgiveness wrapped in neat conclusions. I just want to know, what version of me do I have to tear apart, rebuild, unlearn, and relearn for the path to shift even slightly toward the place where you don’t look away?
How do I make things right?
Tell me where to begin.
Even if I won’t like the answer.
–aaditya
Love is a language I mispronounced until it sounded like your name. Soft at the edges, but sharp when I swallowed it. You were never a chapter, you were the margins where my thoughts spilled over, messy, unsanctioned, necessary.
I won’t say goodbye. No. That word doesn’t exist in this dialect of ache. It’s not denial; it’s just that you became a part of the architecture. The breath between my sentences. The pause before my morning coffee. The way my left shoe always comes loose first, somehow, always you.
I tried once. To let go. Folded the memory of your laugh into a paper crane and launched it into an ocean of forget. But it returned, soggy, wingless, still laughing. You can’t release what refuses to leave. You can’t say goodbye to your own heart.
You’re the metaphor I keep abusing. The love I hang on doorknobs. The ghost that doesn’t haunt but hums. So I stitched you into the lining of my jacket, wrote you into my grocery list, left you between lines of my emails. I carry you in commas, and in between the strings of my ukulele. In late night glances at nothing. In the way I still flinch when someone says forever.
You were never something to be lost. You’re the weight I choose to bear. So no, I will not say goodbye. I’ll keep you with me, folded into the quiet, always, always in the everyday.
-aaditya
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
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
The glow of neon catches your skin—
pink and purple painting shadows on the curve of your cheek.
We are haloed in “good vibes only,”
but the way you look at me is the only gospel I believe.
You wrestle with chopsticks,
a clumsy dance of wood and slick noodles.
Every spicy mouthful steals a blink,
your lashes flutter twice like a nervous spell—
and I am enchanted.
My food cools, untouched.
Yours vanishes, each bite disappearing
into the story of your hunger.
When I offer you more,
you laugh,
slide your plate too far,
topple the glass of water between us.
“Why didn’t I drink this?” you mutter,
grabbing napkins like they’re answers.
I want to ask if you are always this messy
with things you care for.
But I only watch
as you swipe at the spill,
as though it’s urgent.
When it’s cleaned,
I pull my plate between us,
a quiet offering,
a bridge.
You lean forward,
foreheads grazing—
a fragile hello.
“Don’t move,” you whisper,
your breath pooling in the air between us.
“Stay like this. Close.
Like elephants. Did you know they do this?
Heads together, a greeting.”
I don’t tell you
I already knew.
I don’t tell you
I want every moment with you
to feel like this—
strange, and full,
and alive.
aaditya.
December stands still, yet moves within itself,
a solemn breath before the year exhales.
The air whispers secrets of frost and fire,
a quiet warmth nestled in the heart of cold.
Beneath bare trees, life lingers,
fragile as the glass ornaments we cradle,
shining and trembling,
aware of their fragility.
It is the month of hands—
hands to hold close,
hands to wave goodbye.
Snow falls like memory,
each flake a piece of what was,
melting as it lands.
The sky wears both dawn and dusk together,
an endless twilight
where time folds in on itself.
The past feels closer,
the future a breath you cannot catch.
Love in December is fierce,
burning against the chill,
because it knows it must.
Because it knows
it will soon have to let go.
And so, we wrap the year in ribbons,
in the ache of holding on,
in the grace of release.
December, you are the stillness of endings,
the weight of beginnings,
a lesson in everything
we can never quite keep.
aaditya
I Often wonder what it would be like if the world had no colors?
Without blue to mark the sky, how would I even know where the ground ends or begins? The sky wouldn’t care; it never does. It’s me—I need the blue, the reassurance. But without color, would I even need reassurance? It would all be the same. A shapeless, blank thing, indifferent to whether I saw it or not.
No. If there were no colors, would I still feel anything? Would love still have a place in this strange, hollow space? Colors bleed into everything—maybe feelings are just the shades I wear inside. A soft red for love, a cold blue for sadness. If they disappeared, what would that leave me with? Could I still feel love without the red? Would I even know if she was next to me?
Maybe I wouldn’t need to feel her anymore. Maybe warmth would exist without the red to dress it. Maybe it’s all just a glow, like two moons caught in orbit. But even moons need light. Without the sun, they’re nothing. Am I nothing? Am I just a reflection, existing only because of something else? Something that isn’t there?
But… maybe that’s not emptiness. Maybe it’s the beginning of something else, something beyond the colors that have fooled me into believing they mattered. Perhaps the love remains, even when I can’t see it.
What if color is love? What if red isn’t just a hue, but the pulse in my chest? If I lose that red, what happens to love? Would I even be able to touch her in a colorless world? Can touch exist without the proof of color? Without the feel of warmth against skin?
Maybe I wouldn’t need hands anymore. Maybe I wouldn’t need to touch. I could just exist, like a thought floating in endless gray, sensing without seeing. Knowing without proof. A love that doesn’t ask for evidence. But… can love survive without proof? Wouldn’t it all fade, blur into the same endless shade, like a flat line on a blank canvas?
Hasn’t it already?
Maybe life itself is just nothing layered on nothing, a story told through colors I never even chose. If I stripped it all away, what would remain? Would I recognize what’s beneath? Or maybe I’ve already seen it—and I’ve forgotten. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to this same thought, the same question. What if there are no colors? What if there never were?
I think I’ve already had this conversation with myself. Over and over. Like an echo trapped inside my mind, circling back to the same point.
A thousand times, and yet, here I am. Still searching for color in a world that might have never had any. Or maybe… the world never lost its color. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the one who’s gone gray. And I don’t even realize it.
(Aaditya, 2:00 AM, 26/09/24)
Whenever I look at a sunflower
it’d remind me of you.
Sunflowers are metaphors for
the people around whom you feel alive.
I have an open field inside of me
wherein the wind echoes your laugh.
The open field has always been filled
with roses, that your presence has watered.
If this is what the poets call love, then I’ve
laced far too many notebooks with the idea of you.
How everything eventually is about you?
How sometimes i go sleepless at nights, but then
How I yearn to sleep a little bit more
because you came into my dreams.
How I grieve when I am not close to you?
But then what is grief, if not love persevering.
What is grief, if not love with no place to go,
that corners in your eyes, and
in the hollow part of your chest?
What is love, if not the poem
scracthed on the walls of my throat.
How I’d want to linger near the door
uncomfortably, rather than leaving.
How I’d want you to forget your scarf
and come back later, to find it.
What is love, if not everything that I feel for you?
For it was when you allowed me to enter
your world, when I was scared of mine.
Toh aakhir Kaha chala hai man ka rasta?
Tumhare paas.
-aaditya.
Aaditya Bajpai 