Delusions: An excerpt from a short story.

Even in your absence, you are a part of me. Even though you have found your home in someone else's smile, I am trapped forever in that moment when you gazed into the blue of my eyes and swore that nothing would change. 

Music blares in the background. There's a track change. A sudden emptiness swells within me. I stir the melting ice cubes with an orange straw.
The choice was your's. Always.

To forget what you had never believed in. Your forgetting, my remembrance.  Your laughter, my tears. Poles apart, miles away. You still linger in my veins. 

There's a track change. I am lost in the darkness of the bar. The dazzling neon lights draw a light headed and almost choked up sight of us locked in the corner of the world. Unaware and content. I am left tapping my feet urgently against the corner of the cold steel table. I fidget with the straw, swallowing balls of hurt in a crowded room which smells of all the love that we left behind. I plaster a smile tinged with apprehension. The distance and emptiness looms in the darkness.

A springtime tale

The distant, unfamiliar look in your eyes

My paradise lost in bitter reveries of faith.

Spring blooms outside our window,

Crimson, emerald, patches of cherry red

scattered like snow

Brief reminiscent of the past, 

an old Christmas tree and indelible marks 

of coffee on the table.

/Rustling of leaves and the fresh fragrance 

of grass and wet mud doesn't break your thoughts.

By noon, you leave. 

And here I sit, telling my springtime tale of

a paradise lost, somewhere between my 

stormy thoughts of a bleak tomorrow 

and the winter of your ice blue heart.

(c) Ayushee Ghoshal