SECOND INNINGS AT LOVE

By Charu Chandwani

There’s something about second innings at love.

With the same person.

 

It is like sticking back shreds of paper together 

 for the font of your heart to be legible to you

and to him. 

 

It is like erasing the scribbles on your

favourite book to make space for

sweet nothings and love letters that 

write themselves on every page.

 

It is like counting goosebumps on

Your back when you hold hands

after a year. Painstaking.

 

It is like letting a wave hit you, bend your

knees and unroot your feet from your

sand of “NOT AGAIN, NOT HIM”.

 

It is like waiting for a bamboo to

shoot up, taking it’s own sweet long long

time before you grow tired of

being guarded and let the love be its

monstrous best .

 

It comes as slowly as the first one

but when it arrives, you are alerted

as the news channels blare about

the hurricane inside of your heart.

It topples your fears and anxieties

with a heartbeat like a hurricane

topples cars. Crushing to powder

the skeleton of your inhibitions.

 

But it has it’s soft moments of love

notes being slipped into the bottom

Right pocket of your black leather jacket.

Of chasing intertwining of fingers like 

fireflies 

in libraries, parties, movie halls,

bus stops, camps, bonfires by the

Rivers .

 

This love has a lot more maturity to be young,

after all who at all decides the age of

a love?

One day you are giggling like a child

as you sit on thermocol balls.

The other I send you away with a 

heavy heart because family comes 

First. 

One night I don’t let you

sleep because my fingers want

to piano key your back and

harmonize our love for the 

watchmen and owls to wonder.

The other you rock me to

sleep as I snore away tired

From all the 58 side

professions I’ve worked 

in my day dreams.

This love believes in hope 

even though the world spins

on tentative goodbyes.