I wake-up with eyes swelled up like that after bee stings and a stuffy nose.
Tear stained.
But it’s only until the alarm goes off in the morning,
And I hear the whistle of the cooker.
Mum is upto something again,
One of aunt Della’s recipes as I recall with boiled peas and vegetables for the breakfast.
Dad, a victim of schizophrenia after years of chronic obsessive compulsive disorder;
Prefers staying indoors, with repetitive cups of tea and lethal doses of news on the television.
Bruno comes to me wagging his hairy tail over my face, reminding of his walk I’ve been putting on hold for a week now.
It’s seven in the morning.
The walk,
That is in all likelihood, the only sixty minutes out of the fourteen forty that gives me a chance to reflect back on the choices I made-
A full retrospect.
You see, there is an entire promenade one needs to walk in order to forget something or somebody.
It begins with memory erasure, followed by selectively removal of things you desire to forget.
Things slip from the conscious, if not the subconscious.
For me, it was his voice that I first forgot,
Followed by the way his nose shone in the moonlight,
The marks on the apple of his cheek;
Eyes halfway between the top of the head and the chin,
That you could fit another eye in between.
His mouth was at one third of the distance between the nose and the chin,
The corners of the mouth line up with the centers of his eyes.
The top of ears line up slightly above the eyes, in line with the outer tips of the eyebrows
And the width of his shoulders was equal to two head lengths.
Together with all these little idiosyncrasies,
I remember the way he made a weird sound while chuckling,
And how he set his hair right up, followed by precisely two spritz of his favourite cologne.
It still takes me by surprise how he never grew weary of the same fragrance and put it on religiously.
Owing to the things that I remember and forgot over time,
There are still his habits that I’ve inculcated.
Before and since him, I’ve known that we love who we love,
With respect to all the things we are and not,
And without respect to all the things we will ever be.
People like us,
We do look for happiness but can never cajole it into something that would outlast time.
Bruno wants me to let go of the latch and let him run wild in the park.
It’s a beautiful day.
The clouds have a little bit of hue in them.
Infinite boulevard 