#NaPoWriMo Day 18: Cruel Games, A Hundred Lives.

Today’s activity by napowrimo.net was to go through the table of contents in Susan G Wooldridge’s poetry collection Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life With Words and use one of the titles as inspiration for our poem.

I decided to take multiple titles from the collection and incorporate them in my poem (the titles are all marked in red, if you’re curious).  It started out as something completely different and ended up turning into something I really, really like. And while you’re at it, make sure you go read the poems by my best friends on Kittu’s Modern Mixtape and Amour Infini.

Happy reading and don’t miss out on the endnotes to read more about the poem. Xx

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I keep wishing I could meet you for the very first time,
All over again…

Perhaps our tragedy could take a different turn,
And we could relive the same pain
A hundred something times in a hundred something ways,
Never quite revealing our real names—
It could be a game we play,
Two strangers from far away,
From another time, in another life,
Running towards each other, and then drifting away.

Why did you have to stay?
Who were you in my dream?

Leaving behind ghosts and whispers
Of interlaced breaths and intertwined fingers,
Weaving into me and getting under my skin,
Vines of ivy of our delicate sins;
We’ve been tried, we’ve been tied, together by fate,
But this is, by far, the most cruel game I’ve played—
Perhaps in another time, in another life,
If I’d handed you the knife, you would’ve walked away.

I open the window and leave it that way,
Hoping you’ll find your way home;

A lost cause I catch myself fighting for,
Hoping we’d find a way back to how it was before,
And every storm, every thunder makes me want you more,
Knowing we’d only fall apart, then walk out the door;
The truth dawns over like a new day,
What fell apart can never be the same again,
But we keep wishing, this heart’s a fickle thing,
We turn a blind eye to everything that was broken.

I keep wishing I could meet you for the very first time,
All over again,

As though the pain of a lifetime wouldn’t last me the night,
Intoxicated on the heartache,  it’s a new high,
We keep burning in the flames, playing with fires,
Making fragile promises, we’re such good liars—
Lying to tell the truth, we have our secrets to keep,
But say the word and I’ll lay them all bare,
I’ll show you places nobody has ever seen,
Just say the word and you can come with me.

I keep wishing I could meet you for the very first time,
But we share too much history—

What was once can never again be,
Not when the past comes knocking at our windows,
Lest every moment stolen gets taken away from us,
It hurts me so, but with a heavy heart, this is where I leave,
With goodbyes that will never be enough,
But they’re more than you ever left me with—
And the promise to see you in another life,
If our fates will ever allow it.

And I wish…
I  wish,
I keep wishing in vain,
To meet you for the very first time,
All over again;
We could rewrite the stories that never ended well,
Challenge all the stars that fell,
Change our fates to everything we want them to be—
But the very first time I laid my eyes on you,
You laid yours on me,

I’m afraid that is something we neither can
Nor we will ever be.
So, here’s how we end,
In a tragedy,
Tucking away your face from the first time I saw you
With my fondest, most painful memories.

~© Shubhangi Srinivasan.

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Let’s be honest, we have all wished we could go back in time, to something that was very dear to us. But the more we really think about it, the more we realize that there were flaws even before everything fell apart, and that those flaws were not ours to fix. We are allowed to think about how things could have played out differently for us. but there is grace in accepting where we are right now and there is grace in letting go, even if it means you’ll always hold on to a part of it. I hope you enjoyed reading the poem!
Yours truly,
The Shubhster. Xx

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Featured Image by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash