The Step

In the morning, when I wake up, 

And feel the wind blowing in through the window,

The sun streaming in, the birds calling out:

every creature welcoming the new day, 

I turn over and shut my eyes, shut the world. 

I want to embrace this gift of a new day, 

But something heavy in my mind settles in, 

And I have conflicting thoughts. 

I want to get up, go for a run. 

My body feels tired.

I want to take a shower, make breakfast for Mother.

She cooks better anyway.

I want to start the day with positivity. 

What good will it do when all my days are the same. 

I should take control of my life.

I should just roll with what happens. 

Only dead fish go with the flow, and I am not dead. 

Aren’t I dead already?

I am alive. I am living. 

I am numb, and I don’t have the drive to live. 

The first step is stepping outside of the comfort bubble.

Shut up, shut up, shut up. It never works. 

Just one step. One step and my journey will begin. 

The more optimistic I am, the more failure hurts. 

On some days, depression wins. 

I stay in bed, shut everything out, 

push everyone away, lay in bed

as if I were dead. 

On fewer days, I take that step. 

I get up. I push myself to run. 

I experience the flush of having

oxygen running in my body,

I feel thirsty, I feel my muscles aching

as if I were alive. 

Sometimes, it is that small step that matters. 

It changes everything, disregards life’s incongruence. 

And after, even the taste of failure 

is the mark of successful existence.

suicide

 

we speak a lot, noiselessly

 

We understood our silence more than we heard it

There is something meaningful 

about the silence that two people share, 

there is a depth to it, yet it is not heavy; 

like the experience of being underwater 

and not moving at all, merely floating, 

just lying under the blanket of silence. 

People who share a million decibels

worth of conversation, only in a turn of 

the minute hand, often those people 

are linked with an invisible string, 

for they can speak noiselessly, voicelessly. 

In is in those moments of silence

that they take in everything about each other, 

the craters in one’s left eye, the scar on their cheek, 

the way their eyes flicker back and forth, 

the way one’s fingers are interlocked. 

It is those moments of silence 

that leave an imprint of their minds forever, 

such that when they meet again, millions 

of turns of the minute hand later, 

and they look into each other’s eyes, 

they bathe in the memories 

of their silence.