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
Aaditya Bajpai 