My Pain-T Box

It’s funny how I have started to picture the whole thing. Differently, so differently. The way I had never wanted to see it.

We never seem to have enough colours to paint rainbows in the sky. We just sit, in silence, looking at the sky turning black right before our eyes. But black? It has always been my favourite colour, peaceful and clear. It always made me feel like I have nothing to lose, but this time, I believe, the black, motionless sky is itself the remainant of everything I have lost.

All I see is nothingness, the black abyss, which intends on making us unconscious. It feels like we are on two opposite sides of the universe, and our way back to each other has been wiped out, all the flowers we had watered together have died of thirst. I search for your fingers between the spaces of mine, but all I find is dust. I search for you between the words of my poetry, but I never find you.

How did we get here? How did our words start making war instead of love? How did the hearts and flowers turn into daggers and poison?

You know I’d run to you and flash lights in your eyes if you find yourself in a dark place, but the light has been shattered, the pieces of the broken glass remain, which will only hurt our hands if we try to pick them up.

I’d use tape to seal our hearts together, but the same tape is sealing our mouths shut.
I try to find my way to you even in darkness, but my feet hurt because of all the cactuses that lie in our way. I can see you walking towards me too, but the strings which connected us to each other are breaking and falling to the ground minute my minute, and as we bend to pick them, they only entangle further, choking us.

I deliberately spill ink on everything I write for you so that, even if I couldn’t stop myself from opening the book, the book would not be able to open me.

I try to run to you, But with every step, the colours within you start to distort, and everything which is left of you is an unrecognizable monochrome. But I don’t want to stop, I pick up my box of paints and run towards you again, and I wish I could begin again with a blank sheet of paper where you and I can draw us together, rectifying every mistake from the previous portrait. We look at each other with a look which be both cannot quite decipher, a look of longing, and hurt and heartbreak and desire. We run towards each other like we are running for our life and by the time we reach each other, the colours burst into sparkles and fly away, colouring everything again, except you, except me, except us.

All we are is a silhouette, colorless, motionless, and unrecognizable.

- Manisha Agarwal