Stanger Traces – Delhi Poetry Slam

Stanger Traces

By Aditi Mishra

 

The person in the mirror isn’t me as I stare 
at my unfamiliar reflection 
in the aftermath of a nightmare.
Still dark at a quarter to six this dawn,
the haunting silence ---
only broken by dogs barking in the distance
and tires screeching on the glossy road.
How often do we drive blindly
even when we have nowhere to reach. 
Have I not driven with reminiscent traces 
of all those people that vanished as scattered photons
in parallel universes that I’d never see. 

The glass in the bedroom of my new house
has been broken since I’d moved in,
paving the way for wind to howl at night.
I’d never really noticed how odd it was
for everything seemingly perfect but a spot,
a flaw inevitable in clamorous carousels.
The previous owner of this house
was a woman living in ecstasy,
who I heard breathed her last the other day,
lost in the cobwebs of anxiety forever. 

It is now that I notice the patterns in the dark
when the silence of the night screams the loudest.
The broken pieces of glass juggle in my dreams,
and I imagine how she would’ve lived a life of facades,
perfect from afar yet lonely and depressed.
Now I can picture her shrivelled joy crumbling
under muddled brown tears beneath her pillow,
sending shivers down the morose spine of memories.
Three hundred and fifty-four days of unspoken agony,
she’d crossed them in white behind the picture on the wall.
Perhaps she’d fought hard to exist in this world,
suffocating inside the chambers
whose walls kept shrinking.
Anxiety paralysed her warm fingers,
unable to open the window to breathe
and it ate her, rotting from within,
wilting her fragrant valley of hopes,
not demons, not monsters, but herself. 

Perhaps she dragged herself from this bed to move forth
then drenched her fears in shower and
gulped warm coffee that tasted bland,
dreaming of a grand escape every day
with lumps of mundane thoughts to puke
while trying to find herself,
and I find in her handwriting a note
‘Is existence a lonely struggle?’
The faded note is her memoir
staring with a threatening grin at me. 

The person in the mirror isn’t me as I sleep 
in different dwindling monochrome versions
beneath the walls of an anxious subconscious gateway
collapsing in voids of silence in universe 
and I trace the remnants of my existence
floating in memories to syphon in parts
the pieces of who I have become.
These crystal button eyes on my face
don’t reflect my essence anymore,
my jawline seems to recede every second.
Her imprinted moments
have bloated in my universe--
sublime molecules of supernova
and I am the black hole that engulfs 
their haunting seconds of life
as the silhouette that outlines 
the stagnant canopy of galaxies. 

My fingers touch the walls and dip 
in rivers of shrivelled sand dunes,
a scream from within breaks the walls,
No! No! This cycle has to end,
I hear a familiar voice,
feeble yet calm, persisting to stay.
At dawn I see a few familiar outlines  
emerging and brushing my reflection.
I shiver and write in ink beneath her words
for someone else to read it someday
‘But you will survive through it.’ 

The person in the mirror is me, 
for now, until dusk.



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