Being invisible is my super power
How dare you make an eye contact with me.

-

Where are you from?

When someone asks me where I'm from, I fall into an existential labyrinth. My parents are from a place that I'm barely acquainted to, and I've lived my whole life at a place that they are afraid to call their own.
What am I, if not the extension of my parents' life. And why I am, if all I can be is the extension of their life?
If this all was not enough, the cherry on top is that I'm a woman. Society has a very blurry line around the existence of women. The family she is born into keeps reminding her that she was born to be given away, she can never be theirs. And the family she is married into was never hers to begin with. What is a family then? Where can she draw a line to separate the rest of the word from her own? Where is she from?

-

बहुत वक्त हुआ उनसे मिले,
अब ख़ुद की याद आने लगी है।

-

I feel like an extra
In my own show

This is more than
You'll ever need to know

-

Out of all the things
We could have been
Maybe being a familiar stranger
With wishes and demands and
memories and histories and
terrors and sorrows and
things we are afraid to name
isn't the worst part at all
Maybe this is the part
we were supposed to play
where when you search for my eyes
I make myself look away

-

What do you do with the dead pain?
A pain that only your
almost dead self recognizes
and tries to suffocate it
before it gets a chance to breath

Do you let it live
or kill it with ignorance?
And what if it creeps back in,
in the dead of the night?

How do you soothe a ghost
that's been haunting itself?

-

~ Tell me you'd put me out of my misery.

-

I keep on burying the butterflies
so they never find their way to my stomach
on the mention of your name
Yet somehow, the grave always falls short
The wind blows all the soil and leaves
a barely there opening
The butterflies are dead, I'm sure
The opening is a mockery of their misery

And then someone calls out your name

-

Did I tell you, you've grown prettier over time?

-

We will make promises to make things work together
I'll hold onto that while my emotions throng for you.

Our pictures tangled in fairy lights hangs above my headboard
To see your lips curl into that smile, I'll right all wrong for you.

I'll break my heart thousand times to spare yours from scratches
Between now and forever, my refugee heart will belong for you.

They say, to love and lose is better than not to Love at all
I'm repeating this in my head as I stand strong for you.

Don't you think it's a little cliché even for a poem, Rashmi?
I'll re-write all the clichés if I could just come along for you.

-