Another Time, Another Place
By Anindya Arif
I am writing this at six am in the morning
At the back of a nearly expired milk carton.
of late, it has dawned on me how
I never got to ask you
Why do you hate that patient in ward 5088 so much?
or what the view from your window is
Whether a run-down bridge
or a fluorescent mulberry-lit store that
Only sells maps of Cincinnati
With brown borders
Like the colour of your eyes.
Years later, after you have been gone
The memories of you
Are now all muddled in a fantasy
Trapped in the only vignette I have of you
That holds no sentamantilty
or anger at you for not being here.
I am alone in my phantom grief,
Even though loneliness has always been
An inescapable part of you
​
You have never asked me about
How living in the neighbourhood of grief
Feels like.
Overlooking,
All the people destined for fait accompli.
or why all of my words on paper
Are just blaring sounds an
Ageing answering machine makes.
Yet you still speak in a 90s indie way
And your only regret is permanence.
You never expatiate about
How the ghostly afternoon
Spent in the midst of a
Nashville rainstorms made you
Want to be an amanuensis.
I do not want these sombre realisations hanging over me
or the warning signs starting at me
Anything you do to me would be far from
The worst things to have ever happened to me.
There is so much fear and reckoning right now
At my fingertip
That everything I have written
so far is smudged.
But you are still living In LA,
Taking the last train home,
And you are not anymore someone
Crushed by thirst or a saudade.
