By Upasana Sarraju
The clip-clops fell silent. It spoke in tongues.
Mo’s footstep,
dragging sound of something held hostage.
A desert predator slithered into her marrow,
its venom locking her limbs,
its hunger patient.
Fear—the kind that rearranges a room.
Pinned on sheets that glowed faintly with streetlight spill,
a syrup that turned her body to a thing left behind.
Only much later, when everything slackened,
did she reclaim motion—the freedom to reach for sleep.
And then the crying began, raw and unstoppable.
Mo—
her fists like stones, her mouth dry with curses.
Of a twin,
who broke,
and became something else entirely.
Of Po,
a chunk of the finest granite,
untouched.
And of someone—
a blurred figure of maybe—
They came and went, the thoughts,
vagabonds in a dimly lit motel,
pulling like a garrote.
Love was no sanctuary, she realized,
just an illusion with frayed edges.
She’d read somewhere that her longing was nothing more
than synapses firing in the wrong order.
Had she brushed her teeth?
The world handed her easy diagnoses:
a job that smothered her,
a childhood too jagged to hold.
Even her hunger for an embrace—
that deep, primal ache—
was dissected and named:
an error in wiring,
a rogue flicker of the brain.
Her feet went numb in the draft
sneaking through splintered wood.
The thought of her blue socks, forgotten and warm,
made her shiver.
Whoever loved her would be no savior,
just another creature with broken edges.
There would be nothing luminous about them,
nothing to worship.
Still, the idea of love had always been immense.
She had imagined it once,
at a bonfire with the Roadside Patrol Volunteers—
something too wild to hold without burning.
It wasn’t hunger, but thirst that hurt.
Not trust,
but the soft edge of a smile about to turn.
Not rage,
but something guttural,
ancient.
Absence doesn’t claw.
It rests lightly, a weightless hand pressing on the chest.
Still, I believed,
for every breathing body,
there had to be love.
Love in its salted, unwashed, human weight.
Surely.
There had to be more than
daylight, fluorescent bulb,
daylight, fluorescent bulb,
daylight, fluorescent bulb,
daylight…
Surely.
Wow