Forgotten?

You sang to me under city lights

Where I found your skin quiver with the music

As you hummed and strummed a hallelujah

To what was to be, a love affair under candle lights.

Three years of grey boots on Christmas baby, and a digital watch to keep time

Of the walks across hallways, forests, beer bottles and

Always, always canvas shoes for ferocious table tennis matches,

As the snow peaks looked on silently upon us.

Camping tents found in the city, pitched in forests we found with exotic names

Mawphlang, Bunga, Mawlynnong, Jilling, Mylliem and fondly, being called kong.

I thought kong was a gorilla and you said it was a beautiful woman.

Language that pulled us together like slow moving cable cars, back when flights were expensive and smiles free of cost.

We walked a lot together

Just being average, you and me.

Through malls filled with people and forests filled with silences

That enveloped my hand around yours, always too small to fit and hold its head high up at the same time.

But the longest walk was the one down the cemetery

As the motorbike braked to a screeching halt.

Little did I know then that the sweaty passions hereafter

Were no foretellers of sunny afternoons spent waving happy goodbyes at railway stations, confident in the knowledge that they’d be followed up with phone calls of “I’ve reached love, and I miss you”.

I went up to the world’s highest mountain pass

To see how far and how high up were the mountains rising between us.

And exotic names followed us here too

Stok, Turtok, Tso Moriri, Thiksey.

But never the only one that belonged to us, and we to it,

Never that piece of sky called Home.

We loved Briseis, the lone Royal Enfield of the Himalayas

Named after a priest’s daughter abducted by your favourite man—Achilles.

How we savoured the sound of "Achilles and Briseis" in the chill of stony 9000 feet altitudes.

Knowing little that mere boredom would crumble all these stories into gorges yet unknown.

They survive, you know. They survive.

Every story lives on, to surprise, to come up suddenly as a teary smile.

One, when you’re sipping that coffee in the middle of mayhem.

Two, when you’re dancing yourself silly in swirls of wine and whiskey.

Three, when you’re desperately searching for the smell of their skin on those you called home for one night.

Lastly, maybe the story comes upon you, listening to a girl’s silly slam poetry.

But, the story survives.

Even when you move across the ocean, wiping your slate clean.

Even when, love, you want the blue sky and I the blue sea.

Even then, the stories survive and search in futile rhymes, like these.

Until one day, you just cannot remember the voice anymore. Until one day, the voice disappears.