The first love, the innocent naive and unadulterated imagination and emotion followed by a tragic fall out. A chance meeting is a beautiful narrative piece that writes about two people who were in love, meet years later and revisit their ups and downs, which is seemingly frozen in time. Derived from a heart to heart conversation with an old friend, this poem captures everything naive and fragile about love and heartbreaks.
“If they ask about me, tell them:
She loved me and I broke her.”
The flashbacks made a collage
When she met him today,
Hallway alley, 2’o clock.
Her cheek was red,
Eyes numb and puffy
Before they burst into beads
At the sudden knock.
Brown leather jacket,
Black trouser and herself;
Smitten and collected,
Strong like a rock.
His hands were working themselves
Into the habit of daily chore,
Only to pause short
At the glimpse of a heart: sore.
Clean blue denims,
A white shirt outlining the grey sweater;
That’s his casual cast
Apart from a black sock.
Two years, seven months,
Even today his windshield’s covered in snow;
She too stands frozen
At this sudden entrance
To the old deserted landscape
As if they had never let it go.
A quite peep each day
Followed by a recursive take back;
But no air to gasp in
When their war zone is the only escape plan.
Them words, she by-hearted
To shoot at him,
Them curses, she bigoted
To even their game;
If ever a moment like this could cross her way.
But all tears collected in a pit each night,
And all backlashes in front of mirror each time;
Retaliated themselves to bewilderment
At this chance meeting.
All back-end quotations faded
And every band aid hiding that single scar ripped open.
This was the judgement of all broken day dreams that now eventually made a way to nightmare screams.
All efforts he took on his vein
To disguise a guilt,
All retaliations he created
To clear their way;
Every effort to disregard his doings went wasted
At this intersection, from where no roads let away.
Apologies far away, that spring were said and done;
But new shots were gunned into his chests
That her ever-suffocating presence fired.
Never expecting to cross roads in this wide world,
The dryness in his throat sprung
And nothing his cigarette or her coffee could soothe, until the silence deafened those words, dreams and roots.
A little wheeloscope inside their heads brought the picturesque sliding on this desk.
Hastily done promises, short lived smiles, and red blushing cheek hanging on his words, her paranoid trials and the cold war.
Long trains of bleak prospects,
Swinging to and fro, the delirium of a love,
Turning round and round in the same cycle;
Until the day it finally collapsed.
But what may happen now, if words go.
She bears the conflict and dares to leave.
He rises on his feet, opens his mouth to speak.
Words form an unclear cloud of smoke
And a sound leaves her heavy heart, a little squeak.
She defences herself by raising her hand,
But the fingers brush him and bitter turns better.
Pain gushing in and for that little a while,
His eyes meet her, crisp and direct the contact;
Regret and apology in them, flutter.
Hesitant to make the bold run,
He holds her hand, the move dreaded but not undone.
“I could say sorry, for ever and ever.
But you wouldn’t feel better, if you give up on me never.”
For her, a little droplet
Overwhelming its presence, cuts the chase to his palm.
Millions of emotions, in these seconds, rose to calamity and then subsided to calm.
Flickering, that weak a flame, the breeze
In the chill, agitates the rays.
“Why you never told me that this wasn’t meant to be;
Before I had taken in your arm, already?”
A subtle flip of colour, the rigidity, strangely new to his eyes.
But a recurrent flash of this vision, kills the flame.
It’s again cold and dry, again.
His eyebrows twitch and forehead lines.
No answer to that; a question, he swore his life.
Cursing mentally, all roads that brought him to her,
He took the rage in his words, every single time.
“I wish we never knew each other.
I have nothing else to say.
Tell me what’s inside your head,
So that I can again walk away.”
Swallowing some unknown threat, gulps in her neck,
Down all the way.
Every inch of her body stood paralyzed, that day, in that moment, in every way.
The minute interval subtending an infinite pause;
She was ready to face her fears.
But not here, rather in her getaway.
“I wish I could wish just the same;
But you know, I’m not good at this game.
Deserted and devastated, I hope you long to come back.
Because I’m the only one, who wouldn’t back-stab.
Carry this burden all your life,
Your pride and ill-judgement became my knife.”
And she left, left him behind’
With a tear of hers on his palm, getting dry.
A tear that will echo within him, a truth he knew always and iterated it for ever:
“She loved me and I broke her.”
I hope this poem gave you something to think about. And if you want to stay just a little bit longer with it, the podcast for this is available here.
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