// My heart is a crematorium where buried are the caskets of my illicit love stories and my body is the cranked oven which baked the parmesan scars of his, who left. //
Honey-dipped sun cradling along the ice cream residue across the dusky horizon/ wind marinated cheeks cuddling against his aftershave/ Hindustani classical music tenderly held hostage in my amygdala/ creases on his lips holding the lyrics / his handpicked hypnotic Gajra bedridden behind my ears, sings lullabies to my insomniac heart.
// Letters are the swathes of spring sunshine and the envelope is the pashmina shawl; opening them is alike sipping mojito on an autumnal evening, and reading them tastes quarterly of chamomile tea, basking under the moon's glade. //
That winter, it smelt like you and me, under the blanket, where we kissed all night.
That winter, it smelt like a roofless shack basking under the summer sun.
That winter, it smelt of meaty kebabs from Karim Chacha's.
That winter, it smelt of warm stew and hot chocolate sundae, soft and cascading/ like my skin cuddling against your aftershave.
That winter, it smelt of the railings of the Rabindra Setu, sunbathed in the Kalbaishakhi.
This winter, I bake cookies and cheeseballs; it smells of the memory of your departure.
It smells stale and cold.
It smells of melancholy dancing to the rhythm of my dead heart.
It smells of the pullulating periwinkle, counting its own last breath on my grave.
// The numbness thawed for a moment. The lump in my throat began to hurt, increasing in radius, with every passing moment. //
Our love stories succumbed to the forgotten telephone booths.
The world is cruel to have picked up my heart, squeezed the lunch out of it, and discarded it in the sewer.
The birds autotuned their chirping to hum the swan-song.
They read our love tales clandestinely to the mauve skies and buried them.
Sohagni, 18 years old, is an undergraduate student of English Literature at Hindu College, University of Delhi. She likes to write for she loves the redolence of new books; to flip the pages, and majorly to acclimatize her friends with the mythical characters to whose character traits they aren't even cognizant! She listens to music, reads ardently, and paints.