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.
