Handbook on how to forget//memory loss ~ Avinash Singh

 

Handbook on how to forget//memory loss

The first to be forgotten was my name,spilling out from the edges of your melancholic mouth, like champagne or the bottle that falls and breaks because you were having too much fun to notice
the broken shards
under the dancing feet.
I'll come to know of it only when
the blood stains my mother's carpet and the ruins of
it will become the talk
of our small town.

I am the pipe dream
in your grand scheme of plans, left out of the nostalgia that's shared over a glass of beer with our college friends that were yours anyway.
Erased from the memories; nothing but a distorted reflection in the water as one peers from the riverbank,
the stone that skips a few times and is lost or
scribbled lines that don't fit into the rhyme
or sandcastles being swept away by the high tide.

memory loss
is the illusion the other woman clings to as she dreams
of being more than a dirty secret, mistaking dishonesty for sanctity.
It is the love language between strangers who were once friends,
letting us know that
the silence has grown to be uncomfortable now.
It is the fancy wrapping paper around the indifference, the lack of empathy one feels as one loses friends and gains new ones and blames it on time or work or anything else.

The last to leave would be the guilt.
That would gather around our chest, leaving us breathless.
It would creep up on us
in our happiest moments,
steal the spotlight and would turn sunflower fields into barren lands. The poison ivy would break through the window
and it would always be
pouring rain outside our house. And only when
it passes, will it clear the air, soothe the ache and bring forth acceptance.

Till then, we will drink
our sorrows or bury them.
Be deaf to the familiarity of names, blind to the intimacy of places.
Till then we'll let memory loss be our solace.