Aaditya Bajpai

  • koi no yokan (恋の予感 – “The premonition of love”)


    Title: Koi no Yokan
    (恋の予感 – “The premonition of love”)

    The subtle sense, upon first meeting someone, that you will inevitably fall in love with them.

    There are certain nights that don’t end.
    Not in sleep.
    Not in silence.
    Not even in forgetting.

    I met her between two seconds. Not a full moment

    no, something briefer. Something before memory, before decision. The way a drop of ink might already know it’s meant to spill into a poem. That’s when I felt it: koi no yokan, not quite love, not yet, but the certainty that it will be.
    I think my heart bowed before I did.

    She didn’t say much. But it was the way she looked at empty chairs, as if they all remembered someone. The way she picked at coffee mugs like the rim held secrets. You don’t fall for people like her.
    You remember that you already did.

    I tried to fight it with logic, measured breaths, practiced detachment. But koi no yokan is a liar. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t ask. It settles. Like smoke in a closed room. Like light through paper walls.
    And that night, I wasn’t breathing smoke, i was inhaling her inevitability.

    I don’t know her name.
    But I know I’ll love her.
    And in some ways, maybe I already do.
    That’s the cruelty of koi no yokan
    it’s not love.
    It’s worse.
    It’s the whisper before the scream.
    It’s the outline before the absence.
    It’s knowing the fire is coming, and warming your hands anyway.

    And if you ever feel it…
    You’ll understand.
    This wasn’t a meeting.
    It was a prophecy.

    –aaditya

  • I tried to be my own muse for once. I couldn’t do it though. I can write her in a book, but can’t write myself in a word.

    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.

  • If you’re out there, eyes closed, I hope they open in a world where you remember how I held the screwdriver wrong but tried anyway.

    I left the tap running again. Not for the water, not even by mistake, but because I needed to hear something constant. The sound covers the slow erosion, the way your voice echoes less and less in the furniture. It’s strange, how absence doesn’t shout but hums. Like a fridge left unplugged, still warm inside. I tried to fix it by rearranging the chairs, hoping the shape of the room would summon you back. But now the walls look confused, and so do I.

    I keep thinking if I could just find the right frequency, between apology and defiance, I could broadcast the version of us that never cracked. But radios don’t speak tree. And lately, I’ve been turning into one: rings of memory tightening around hollow bark, reaching out with broken branches that pretend to bloom. Do you remember the apricot season? I bit into one and tasted your name, rotten at the pit. I kept eating.

    They told me not to swim in the lake after dusk, but I went anyway, arms tired from holding all the “what ifs” above water. I thought maybe if I drowned in something that wasn’t metaphor, you’d see it on the news and call. But you never liked water. Said it reminded you of things slipping. Maybe that’s why you left like a tide no one noticed pulling back, taking my reflection with you. I’ve been trying to skip stones with my grief but it just sinks.

    I know, rights and wrongs are carved in wet cement, and we never agreed on when it dried. You said rules were for people who forgot how to love, and I laughed like a coward. If I could go back, I’d let your madness win more often. You were always trying to show me the other side of the page, but I kept tracing the lines that were already written. Now I fold paper cranes hoping they’ll fly toward wherever you’re not pretending.

    It’s that time again. The clocks slow, the air thickens, and I find myself lagging behind days that never looked back. I miss you in the way the mirror fogs before a face appears. In the way my hand still reaches for a switch that no longer lights anything. If you’re out there, eyes closed, I hope they open in a world where you remember how I held the screwdriver wrong but tried anyway. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe this was never about fixing. Maybe I just needed to be seen breaking.

    –aaditya

  • I kept writing her, again and again, until the page began to look like love

    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

  • And if time’s supposed to heal, why does it ask for more of me every day?

    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

  • She leaves like dust does

    I held her name in my mouth for so long it started to turn into something else. A weight. A stone. Not a name anymore, just the residue of it. The sound of someone you once whispered to sleep now rotting behind your teeth. She loved tulips. She loved rainy days. I remember thinking I’d give her both, forever, even if it meant standing out in the storm with my hands full of flowers I didn’t know how to keep alive.

    But I never learned how to build anything without destroying something else. When she cried, I told myself it was just the weather. When she laughed, I thought maybe she was forgiving me. Maybe I’d earned a few more days. I hadn’t.

    She didn’t leave dramatically. No screaming. No suitcases. Just a quiet unraveling, like a thread pulled until the whole thing disappeared. One day she said, “I can’t do this anymore.” And then there was nothing. Not a goodbye. Not really. Just the hum of a phone screen, still glowing. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was already halfway gone myself.

    I used to be terrified of losing her. Every day, some new version of the nightmare. I rehearsed my pain like a ritual. But none of those versions prepared me for what it’s actually like. To lose someone not with a bang but with silence. A silence that doesn’t even echo. A silence so complete it makes you question if they were ever really there.

    Would I do it again? Yes. Even now. Even with the ending written in blood. Even with the sleepless nights and the sick feeling every time I saw her name on a photo someone else took. I would walk back into it with my eyes open. I would love her again. And maybe this time, I’d say all the things I kept buried. I’d be kinder. I’d listen more. I’d let her see the soft parts of me I was too ashamed to share. I’d let her know that the way she looked at the sky made me believe in something bigger than myself.

    But I don’t get to do it again. And there’s something holy in that. Something in knowing I could’ve done better that keeps me human.

    She’s not a monster in my memories. She’s that song that plays quietly in the background of everything I do. Sometimes I hum along without realizing. Sometimes I forget the words.

    And the fear of losing her? It died with the part of me that thought I could keep her. And what’s left now isn’t fear. It’s the silence. It’s the space she once filled. And it’s mine.

    -aaditya

  • 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

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