Anindya Arif
Your lover spends the majority of his afternoons, thinking of cemeteries, and how you said thinking about people through scotch bottles will turn their memories purple.
Your lover, now a bartender, serves disfigured Glen Fiddich bottles and believes intangible things like feelings still grow on trees;
and often, asks irrelevant questions like
how does one love a woman like you,
or why things that are yellow in colour don’t come with caution labels of “unhinged hopes”.
Your lover, not 21 anymore, still drinks his whiskey mixed with withdrawal,
and recalls your memories through shades of purple; mauve for how you smelled,
electric violet, for your love of Led Zeppelin.
Your lover, now almost 25, still returns home
to unmade beds and absent lovers;
and on Sundays, they dig holes to bury self-deprecating self-love that’s two weeks stale.
At 27, your lover will contemplate how he had always been stuck with Stockholm syndrome, whenever he lied next to you.
At 40, he will become colour-blind, and won’t remember how it felt to be with you. Instead at 42, your lover will write you a poem where you could be 18, and a ventriloquist somewhere in Amsterdam, how your shows won’t come with prior notice periods of how you cannot “scream, cry or leave”.
Instead, your shows would come with trigger warnings like intimacy and of men being delicate, and how one of them saran wrapped you to a mailbox somewhere in Rome, and never returned.
Your shows will be based on a series of monochromatic flashbacks, of all the protagonists suffering from Helsinki syndrome, and how the world is collapsing due to young girls dying of angst and loneliness.
Your lover, now 58, and three suicide attempts later, can no longer remember how your skin felt, neither can he trace this poem back to you. Instead, your lover collapses every time he thinks of you. In a post-war August, your lover at 62 or 19 will overdose on heroin and drown to death.
Anindya eats music, fiction, and reality all for breakfast. Send him fresh recipes at [email protected]