Aadishi Agarwal
UCL Laws student
Hurricanes
Hurricanes don’t trust people like me like I know you want to. Don’t trust that easy smile and carefree laugh that rumbles against your chest or that thoughtless humming as I’m flipping pancakes, because people like me, they’re not meant to be trusted.
People like me are too well acquainted with heartbreak to let tears stain porcelain dimpled cheeks. People like me are like an addiction, we absorb people like you, till you can feel us in your eyes and ears and nose and lungs and skin and head and heart and you can’t stop feeling us. till all your memories are memories of us, long after I’m gone, memories that never saw me leaving, you never saw me leaving, how could you?
I’ll hold your hands, honey fingers fitting right between yours, nestling into your nooks and crannies like they were tailored to match seam for seam, like they were sewn and knit to warm your empty spaces. You forget what your skin feels like when you’re covered in another person, another person’s skin and sweat, till I’m gone. I’ll be gone and all you’ll be able to feel is the phantom of my touch and your fingers freezing, the spaces all too prominent, you won’t be able to get my touch off your skin and my lips off your neck and my smile off your lips. You’ll feel me curled against you as you sleep and you’ll feel legs draped against your waist as you lean against walls that we’ve christened and you’ll dread space, you’ve forgotten how to understand the concrete air around you, like a chain-smoker forgets what clean air feels like, like I was a brand of venom that’s made you forget who you are and so you’re taking pictures unfocused, dizzy and lost, you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
I’ll make you drink all my favourite drinks till they’re your favourite drinks, spiced tea, black coffee, hard vodka, blackberry wine, whiskey on the rocks. I’ll teach you to swirl them in your mouth as they romance your taste-buds, as I romance your taste-buds, as they kiss the edges of your soul and burn the lining of your throat, as they make you cry with your eyes closed in ecstasy till you can’t drink them without that dreaded taste of iron in your mouth, mouth bloody with shattered memories, shattered heart. Till every drop tastes of salt water, not unlike the taste of uncouth tears, till every drops burns your soul as it kisses the lining of your throat. I’ll play my favourite songs as we lay in bed and you look into my brown eyes and when we’re sitting on the beach and as we’re slow-dancing and fast-dancing and drinking cheap wine and you’re pinning me down and fucking me and making me scream and I’ll make you scream at concerts of unknown bands trying to make it big as we’re pushing through the crowds and holding on for dear life, and god you’ll be able to hear the pounding of my heartbeat over the beat of the drums and you’ll be able to feel the pounding of my heartbeat as we’re kissing in the rain afterwards. I’ll whisper poetry into your ears and curtsy after and we’ll get used to the melody of your applause and theatrics.
And then one day all you’ll be able to hear is the echo of my leaving footsteps, and the blare of the silence of my absence. You’ll hear your heartbeat race every time those songs play and not recognise it without the noise of mine above it, and screams will feel hollow, and you’ll hear the rain’s pitter-patter as it hits the ground, buzzing in your head, like it was cheap wine dripping instead, cheap wine alcoholism. And I’ll sneak into your vocabulary, with my made up words and rebukes and endearments, you’ll find them slipping from the tip of your tongue mindlessly and you’ll freeze with realisation. You’ll bite down on your tongue and try to wash the words, my words, out of your mouth, maybe I should apologise in advance, but you won’t forget apologies either, as you’re apologising to yourself and telling yourself that you’d rather have loved and lost than not to have loved at all, cute lies that are supposed to make it better. It isn’t working, is it? And I’ll take you places, I’ll take you to street kiosks and hole in the wall cafes, real pizza and midnight ice-cream, that sushi that changed your life. We’ll go to museums and parks and libraries and beaches and monuments where those lunatic couples carve their names into and you’ll scoff and I’ll giggle and I’ll take you to my room and kitchen, to the dining table, to the living room and you can see my paintings hung up on my walls and dreamcatchers against the bed headboard and tiny post-its all over the wall with my favourite quotes and lyrics, I’ll take you places until you see my giggle and your scoff engraved into those same monuments and my room empty and barren and my walls painted in the red of my blood, the black of my blood, red of the lipstick that would smudge against your lips, I’ll destroy you in the most beautiful way possible,
and then you’ll know why hurricanes are named after people.
The Crumble
Shining in a golden field they lay,
Once upon a cerulean breeze;
A throng of mellow lay astray,
Trapped in the midst of a dandelion sneeze.
Dreaming of those wings,
stimulating the flight,
The undergrowth weeds,
nimbly mumbled.
In jiggling joy,
yet nervous fright
They anticipated the echoes,
of the crumble.
The painful rip,
yet graceful soar
The wicked thievery of the windy sky
The agony and bittersweet of what lay in store,
And the bustle,
of a dandelion cry.
Those dandelions persevered,
then they said their goodbyes,
Spinning melancholically away in the sky
And they looked back just once,
and then glided away,
And away,
and away,
and beyond,
to oblivion.
Goodbyes
She would tell the rain her story on slow drizzly evenings, as she lay on cemented streets wrapped in the scents of earthy musk. Ten, hundred, a thousand- she counted the raindrops falling onto the valleys and ridges of her face, meandering down symphonic cheek bones and jaw lines blushing gold, hiding in the dip of mist-kissed lips and tumbling down from the roll of her chin with not a goodbye.
She babbled and ranted in haste, she had no time for goodbyes: not a moment to waste over the numbing finality that would leave her bereft or the abrupt reverberation of snapping threads- silver threads of rain, of the unravelling knit of the skies coming undone, camouflaging the silver threads from eyes of broken weave. She would recount the darts of her brown eyes- the simple scurries that built complex emotions like building blocks stacked together to make a skyline, a skyline painted in black and Manhattan lights, only slightly blurred by raindrops rolling down her window vantage. Her eyes flurried around noncommittally as though hesitant to fix upon a single speck for a moment too long, a blink too many, a memory too close to her beating heart- she ran from the permanence of forevers: to her, a moment was an infinity of infinitesimal blips, so she had no time for forevers either but she could waste a thought to appreciate the ironic contrast of berserk lonely eyes and slow drizzling rain.
Her eyes were painted in water colour by nimble artistic hands tainted with the splatter from jumping in puddles, the paint of running rivulets of seeping colour bled from her and him and you and me; you were losing hues, she was feeling blue. You were trying something new, she was losing you. And like a drenched canvas, the colours from her eyes ran astray, sprinting like they had to flow far far away. And so she had no time to look back, just some shades to rein, too occupied in recovering the strokes of inebriation in which she was lain. She was chasing after her being as it was running far away driving without inhibition, without forethought: wreck-less or reckless –
Oh, it was a fine line.
Reckless like the storms she created, puddles she trampled through, roads she cruised down, she didn’t have time to drive under the speed limit and wait at red lights, to think of cause and effect, she’d left it behind- without her dreams, she was a girl of a new kind. She had no time to catch dreams, dream-catching was no fun, the thrill of nightmares was the way it was done. Beady sweat, no regret, running from monsters was overrated. Monsters under your bed, in your closets, in the depths of your heart, no true love nestled there,
they’ve lied from the start.
The Amnesty 