“Will the poetry that is leaving me, turn around to look at me, to say goodbye…”

The shower stopped raining, and she stepped out of the bathroom shivering, the poetry leaving to return once her mind was free.

She didn’t like taking a shower but this was the only way she could guarantee it would be a good day.

She missed her bathroom back home where the floors were not sticky and the walls didn’t crawl with earthworms.

She wore the outfit she laid out the previous night and made her hair as always. She had mastered it so well that no one noticed that she couldn't care less. She stacked her bracelets on her right wrist like she did every day. 

She stumbled her way to class on time but in her opinion, she was late because she heard the ringing voice of her mom saying ‘On time is late’.

In class, she sat in the back where the projector’s light dimmed, illuminating her face. 

In a moment of what felt like a mixture of arrogance and self-doubt, she raised her hand but she wished she could  just shut up and have no opinions like she was expected to, and avoid the judgemental gazes and raise people's expectations of her intellect. but she did it anyway because it felt like too much energy not to.

She drinks a couple of cups of coffee before her next class and makes witty comments about every misogynist in sight, as she ought to. She proceeds to compliment everyone else, smiles a bunch and complains an adequate amount about maths. She notices people noticing her. 

She had been here only a couple of months but she had crafted this presence that people regarded as pleasant and friendly, deep down she just wanted to sit down on the floor and scream at the top of her lungs about how she felt trapped in a person she can’t recognize, someone too perfect to be her, she watching someone she didn’t know navigate the world.

This person knew things and made decisions and somehow was not drowning but she constantly felt suffocated like a hostage forgotten in the backroom during a heist in every mafia movie but no one would come to free her. She scribbles another line…

“If you find my poetry, I hope it fills your cracks with cement and tends to your wounds…”

At lunch, she sipped watered-down buttermilk with a collection of people she acknowledged every day but didn’t know. She tried to decipher a language she could not understand while meticulously trying not to accidentally look at a couple in her periphery- who publicly declared themselves belonging to the vampire clan- this is something she had become very good at.

She missed the intellectual stimulation she got back home talking about all things STEM. 

She wondered what the probability of no one noticing for days was if she got up and walked out the gates of the university now. She considered them to be pretty high.

She based this on a series of small experiments ranging from not completing sentences,  to see if people were listening, or adding random words and making it sound like a sentence to see if there was a realisation and finally to test  how really invisible she was in plain sight, she didn’t leave her room for three days and no one noticed, people only realised that they didn't see her, when she resurfaced.A whopping 40% of all test subjects assumed she was hanging with another group of friends- so she inferred that if she were to vanish everyone would assume she was with a different group of friends. Once again the poetry wrote itself.

“In return for my words, tell me which way they went…”

She was alone as she walked under street lamps but a pair of eyes in the crowd made her feel less alone. She knew they would find her. She understood their language without an exchange of words. There was rarely an exchange of words, just the feeling of being heard. 

Sometimes she aimlessly walked through campus just so that she would run into them.

She was doing that currently, she stopped to pick up a fresh flower to put into her hair and she felt those very eyes on her mid-conversation with friends.

There were no smiles exchanged, no acknowledgement of each other's presence  but there was a relief, there was a longing that was met, there was a satisfaction only both their souls could feel like a frequency that their radars would pick up. It was not much but it felt like coming home.

This short-lived locking of eyes being home was not ideal but it was all they had.

Neither of them had the strength to ask for more.

The ‘what if I am making it up’ pulled them away and broke the walls of the home they created. Only the thought that they would find their way back to each other lingering like a fragrance in the air.

In the time they were apart, time seemed to move at snail-speed.

Everything they did till they saw each other seemed to be meaningless things to pass time.

There was only the constant feeling of emptiness that followed them like a shadow of their desires that she hadn’t even disclosed to herself.

She sits on a green bench with her book to her face pretending to read.

She was not pretending actually, she was really trying to focus but the words seemed to be floating like the thoughts in her head and it made her dizzy.

The source of her dizziness could be anything from her lovesickness  to the lack of food in her body but she tries not to think about it too much.

Once again she tries to dedicate herself to the book she so eagerly borrowed from the library about the ecosystems that thrive within whales but was interrupted by a hand on her shoulder.

“Is my poetry worth searching for, is it to call mine to look for ?”

To anyone looking at the clock tower at this hour of the night, they would see that it is night no longer, closing to three in the morning but these two seemed to be frozen in time.

They had never spoken till he interrupted her artist date on that starry night.

Their conversation ranged from what she had eaten for her to be dizzy, to why he doesn't call his dad that often, to why she thinks Eminem and Taylor Swift should have a collab to why he thinks pink is his favourite colour.

They even decided to go to the water cooler because they had laughed till their throats ran dry when they thought the dog that was behind a bush was a couple.

She asked him about the scar on his left arm- which he got from a football match a few years ago- and he played with the bracelets that hide her scars, he understood but didn’t ask.

They talked about movies, she played him her favourite SNL sketch and he explained his theory on how the premier league would go and she countered it with her own.

The thought that hung in the air was what would happen when the sun rises?

Until then, he laid his head on her lap and she played with his hair. 

There were more trips to the water cooler, even one where they raced each other ending with them laying on the grass and looking at the stars slowly reaching for the other’s hand but in the last minute thinking better of it until she finally pulled his hand and held it to her chest and they both felt her heartbeat as the leaves on the trees above rustled with breeze.

When day came, they were still on the green, his arms around her gentle like an armour from all that is bad in the world while she held onto his fingers. As if, when she let go, he would become a figment of her imagination

“Maybe the poetry is all around me, I must settle down and observe.”