tea stains & poetry

Outside my window, the dead leaves are falling from some tree whose name I never cared to find out

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

In the kitchen, i'm disdainfully wiping wet dishes with a washcloth with kpop music blares in my ears

But i don't change or skip the track

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

It's 5 something in the evening and the oil in the frying pan splatters and catches my finger while I'm cooking

I suck on it seductively instead of rushing to get a bandaid

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

My cat's meowing up a storm because he just came home so i go to feed him

But i don't kiss him or pick him up

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

My dating apps are buzzing with notifications of new matches

I ignore them

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

I searched up your name on Facebook last night

Because

I can't get you out of my head...

I saved all your pictures

Because

I can't get you out of my head

I went to the place you work at

And stood outside in a mask and my hoodie for hours till you came out

Because i can't get you out of my head

I'm hiding in your closet tonight

Because i can't get you out of my head

I'm jumping out when you least expect it

Wielding my German knife

That i stole from my sister's collection

While you lay bleeding on the floor, begging me to stop this madness

Is it my fault...

Because i can't get you out of my head?

I go to your drawer

Pull out your gun and put it to my head

If I indeed do turn out to have a heart condition, this also means that this home of yours - our love nest - has been slated for demolition and is no longer fit for residency,

So move out quick before open-heart surgery bulldozes it to the ground and rebuilds it as a completely different structure that bears no resemblance to the place you used to call home,

Or better yet, go back to your family home where you have little roommates living with you too - the freehold whose windows you keep escaping from because the front door has been permanently locked by local authorities to prevent your escape from that loveless prison you were coaxed into,

Or at least go back to take your things, bid your fellow residents audieu, pay off all your due taxes, and exit cordially through the front door, for once - instead of always sneaking out windows like a damned coward.

If so, I wish you all the best in finding a completely new place to live in and please don't trash the hypothetical new place with empty beer bottles/ shishas and then vanish to crash someplace else without even paying rent. Your new landlady deserves better tennants,

And please don't move into some "friend's" house to sleep on her couch and freeload everything without paying a single cent before going AWOL to find another crib,

But most importantly...please promise you will keep at least a piece of rubble from the ruins of your old home to remember me by...

And wear it on a bracelet around your wrist so it always dangles near the sleeves of your favourite sweatshirts for everyone to see...

He tried to test her waters

To see what treasures she had buried in her depths

For him to extract and exploit

But she was too deep for him to stand in

So he dove into her

And in doing so, he knew her

For all that she was and could be

I am a soldier

Who has been to war countless times

Stationed in the battlefield of my mind

The war between the constant desire to die and the instinctual need to live on

A war from which I never came home the same

All my comrades have disappeared

Reduced to ghosts haunting the memories I love (or hate) the most

We closed our eyes, held hands, and went through the explosions and gunshots together

Yet, I opened my eyes and they had been blown clean out of my grasp

Gone...

Their corpses nowhere to be found till today

The only ones remaining holding reduced to severed limbs

There but at the same time, not really there...

After the war, I returned home

To reality

With vacant eyes that have seen things nobody should see

And a constant longing for a body next to mine

Or a hand to hold...

To get through the terrible nights being woken up from night terrors

And dull days spent staring into space - at something out of this world but not visible to the naked eye

And just like war veterans, they commemorate us

With candles and flowers on empty work desks or lockers

After we have died

The glare of a CCTV camera facing a swivel chair that once was covered with flannel jackets,

Now bare

Like the back of a nude girl submerged face-down in a bathtub, screaming underwater so nobody could hear her

The afternoon sunlight piercing through the half-open blinds over a once-decorated desk,

Now empty

Safe for the few fallen hair strands here and there.

The rose-scented breeze she'd create as she darted past desks to go cry in the bathroom,

Now replaced with the harsh, cold glade from the air conditioning units

As harsh and cold as her departure...

The darting glances that she never saw

Now forever unseen.

The new girl who looks somewhat like her but not nearly as exquisite filling in her old place,

Now replacing her.

The thought of her fading away from everyone else's short memories,

But never mine...

A single white rose saved from the memorial bouquet on her desk - which was cleared off too soon,

I remember when we went shopping together at H&M two weeks before you left for your homeland

Never to come home again

The trip where we chose that hoodie that you wear in almost all your photos

Which I helped you pick out - over the boring black one

Which you chose specifically to match the hoodie was wearing that day

I want set the look in your blue eyes when I walked out of the ladies' at one point as my lockscreen wallpaper

You looked really smitten when you said "You're so beautiful..." in a way that even passers-by walking past you you could tell was genuine

After i'd went to the ladies specifically to re-apply my red lipstick

And style my frizzy hair into a sleek low ponytail - which always frizzes up after being washed

And I'd recently washed it while showering at your place 1 hour earlier...

1 hour earlier, when I'd seen a pair of little girl's shoes in your closet

And childish scribbles on your bedroom walls

At the angle from which I was sitting on your bed, drying my hair with your towel

And trying my best to "keep it down", like you signalled me to do

While you were on the phone, while sitting at your office chair facing your laptop,

Speaking (in Urdu) to "a friend back in the motherland"

Which looking back, could only mean one thing...

The thing that changed everything between us that terrible night January last year

And suddenly being a mistress stopped being just another Lana Del Rey song that I loved playing on repeat