please-

kindly go away

and leave me

in my shell,

safe from feelings

and from pain...

You stab me with venomous spit

soak me in tormented moans

slash me with sharp knife words

rip my smile and sliver my esteem

thick boots of lacerated phrases

acid rupturing my life in furrows

floor littered with broken glass

fractured like yesterday’s bones

vomit reeking on floor in anguish

pinpricks of bruising insults, leaving

tracks dribbling across my distress

standing on my chest, you stomp

a preying vulture denting my skin

down on my knees, I hide my soul

from your red face screwed up

as you slit wounds in my heart

bleeding crimson torment drops

shattered life inside word toxin.

- Yo, Pete.

Kid doesn't respond.

- Pete... Petey!

Kid remains unresponsive.

- Pitford Safalofolus!

- That's not my name.

- I knew you'd come around. What's up?

- Nothing.

- Oh come on, it's not nothing. I called you like three times.

Pete looks away.

- What is it?

- I don't wanna be a weirdo.

- We're all weirdos.

- I guess.

- You know, you don't have to talk to me out loud. I won't feel weird.

- But it would still be kind of weird.

- Listen, look at them (I point at the Dwight, the neighbor, as he walks into his house). Look at him (I point at Bob. He's walking his dog). He talks to his dog, and what, you can't talk to me? Dwight, your friends, and every other sorry guy on the face of the earth has a world inside their head. That's what makes cool people cool and boring people boring.

- You're just afraid.

- Psshht. Me, afraid?

- You think I'm getting rid of you, don't you?

- Well, yeah, kind of. So?

- You don't want to die.

- I'm not gonna die.

- Really?

- Well, maybe if I get hit by car. Brains on the sidewalk and all.

Kid laughs.

- What's gonna happen to you?

- I don't know. I don't think you can even decide to get rid of me. I'm not here on request. You're not my king. You're not my god. I'm not yours.

- You're not?

- I'll find something else to do. Someone else to bother.

- So you're like a ghost?

- I don't know little man. Maybe I'll die, but you do what you gotta do. I'm cool. Maybe I'm just from a different dimension. Maybe I'll just disappear, and then... later, when you're older, you might make a movie or a comic or something, and I'm there. I'd be happy there.

- You would?

- Don't worry about me, man. I can hold my own. I was just saying: they're all weird, we're all crazy, and this thing you're going through is normal. If you want to move on and get rid of me, by all means little man. Off you go, but do it now. I don't wanna say goodbye. I don't wanna cry or anything.

Tear rolls down the kid's cheek.

Fist bump.

- You're lucky I'm not a manipulative imaginary friend. I could've threatened to kill myself or something.

Kid laughs.

- Go. Go, go, go, go!

Kid runs into the house.

I walk away.

I touch you

                    Like I did

                               When you were 5

    And your parents ignored you

And I was the only thing

   That was permanent 

      To you

Like I did when you were 3

      And couldn't stop crying

Because your dog died

      And you thought it was your fault

But you-

               You don't believe in me anymore

And you ignore me

When I tried to talk to you

                                 Yesterday                                    

              You screamed

"Shut up!"

   And asked

           If you were going insane

But you're wrong

                It's me who's going insane

Because I thought you needed me

                                                                                                           And now you don't

But I still need you

                                                                                                             Since without you

I wouldn't have existed

Take responsibility

              Play with me forever

                                                        Please

                                                  I don't want you to grow up

And forget me

                                                                                                              Like all the others

Come back to me

You

        You're

                 The only one

Who'd play with me

                                And once 

                                               I was the only one you'd play with

But now

                                                                                                            You don't need me

You

                                                                                                               Leave me behind

You've

                                                                                                               Thrown me away

And

       I fade-

Come-

          Back...

No...

I fear I am repetitive, contrived, predictable

I fear that everything I make is plain

I’m walking in the footsteps of those with real talent

And everything I create sounds the same

I try and rearrange, and it comes out sounding stale

A song that sounds like one that sounds like more

I try and protect my delicate creativity

As it breaks itself against the rocky shore

When I can't and it breaks, we’ll wash  up somewhere

And men will call that wreckage beautiful

But that they also feel like they’ve seen it’s like before

And so I will rebuild and try once more

We were driving home late at night. I stopped to get gas. When I got back in the car, it was there. It was just sitting in the back seat. I saw it through the front mirror.

I didn't know what else to do, so I kept driving. I haven't spoken since we left the gas station. I don't dare to look and see if it's still there.

I wonder if Jason saw it too. He hasn't spoken either. He sits now, hunched over his phone, his fingers flying over the keyboard. He hits one last key and stops.

My phone buzzes in my pocket and I nearly swerve off the road. I silence it and wait. Nothing happens. Maybe it was my imagination after all. I check my phone to see who texted me. It's Jason.

"Do you see it too?"

He whirled through space like a dervish, like a dreidel, going everywhere and nowhere at once. In the distance he saw the flickering lights of Babylonian stars blink out, like bulbs in a weathered Oklahoma farm house. Below him was nothing- no planet, no star, not even a black hole to crush his lungs. It was empty. As he spun, the ape-part of his brain wondered if his useless limbs would be sliced off by the remnants of his space shuttle. But they too had fallen away, as if they were simply another part of his faulty human memory. The void devoured all.

His world was lit by a single red-giant, an obese dying star. It refused to expire first, stubbornly pulsing and exhaling its toxic fumes from hundreds of light-years away. He knew it must have been conceived after he’d fallen asleep, but at this moment it had been there since the beginning of time and would be there until the end of it. He mused, wondering at the fact that he’d awoken in time for the End. What glitch in his harddrive or the computer’s had compelled him to get up, put on his suit and wander amongst the stars.

‘Stars,’ He thought and laughed, realizing the crimson light had already begun to flicker. ‘It isn’t my sun, I’ve never seen it before, its light has never reached Earth, but Christ, it’s all I have now.’ He howled at the encroaching darkness. He could not bear to be alone, with just himself and-

“You’re running away from God!” she had shrieked when she learned he was taking the flight. She had already thrown ornaments and wise men and a Santa Claus, but the only sharp things left were her words. “You’re running away from me, you’re running away from your daughter, but most of all you’re running away from God, because you can’t stand the idea of being judged at the end of your life.”

“If there was a god, I’d outlive you and him both, Karen.”

Her rage simmered and then quelled. She dropped to her knees and sobbed, as the Virgin in the nativity scene looked on serenely.

“You’re going to Hell,” She wept, and her tears glistened with the tree’s colored light, “I can’t- I can’t even save you from yourself, so you’re going there alive.”

“Goodbye Karen,” He walked out then, not wanting to wake Sofia. It would be better if he tiptoed out of her life, a shadow in the night. He knew they let the family see the frozen bodies in their slick-steel containers. They would act as if it really was a funeral and he would not die trillions of years later with the stars.

A part of him started when he realized that his parents, his friends, Karen, even little Sofia had passed away. She had already taken the journey from cradle to grave and whatever came between. They were all gone. He had outlived them all. Though he saw the thought, the vision, he could not feel it. It felt as though the years that separated them were merely miles and it was only distance and not time that was a barrier; as if he could find a way home.

His eyes were drawn to the fat, heaving star and he saw its red light would soon be gone. This, he realised would be the last moments of light. Ever. With the light would go everything that was or had ever been. Spiraling galaxies, infinite columns of stardust, flourishing planets, would all fall away with no one to remember them. And he would be left. He had outlived God- and his prize was to see the very atoms around him dissolve into nothing.

He began to weep as the screeching, emergency siren blared in his ears. ‘It won’t kill me fast enough,’ he thought. He would survive the end of everything and be the only pathetic relic of a miserable world. He would be the only thing to answer for all the universe’s complexities, and triumphs, and errors, and he had missed it all.

Desperately, he pounded on the helmet’s glass, hoping to expose his lungs to the vacuum of space and expire with the stars. He could feel his hands begin to bruise with the force of his blows, but he pummeled anyways. His clumsy, layered-cloth gloves did nothing to the glass. He realized it was steel enforced; it would not budge. The small, human part of his brain took charge over the task. He decided to release the helmet from the bronze collar about his neck. He fumbled at the choker’s keyboard, attempting to type in the password to release himself and the helmet. His fervor finally died down enough to to maneuver his thickly clad fingers onto the numbered buttons. He typed in the digits and awaited death.

It did not come.

Instead, a small calm female voice, below the siren, began to whisper.

“Low-oxygen environment. Helmet cannot detach.”

“I know, I know-”

“Low-oxygen environment. Helmet cannot detach.”

“I know, can’t you see I’m doing this on purpose?”

“Low-oxygen environment. Helmet cannot-”

“Just let me die!” he roared, “let me die before everything else does! Christ, I don’t want to outlast everyone! I don’t want to be God!”

In his fervor he began to beat his head against the sides of his helmet, hoping to crack his skull and splatter his thoughts across the clean glass in front of him. He could not bear to think anymore. He decided he would rather die than face the growing darkness. He thought it a rational decision, only heightened by fear, not motivated by it.

Eventually, he tired and stopped, realizing the neck brace and limited space prevented him from gaining enough momentum. Escape was impossible. He would die in the dark.

A lesser or wiser man may have resigned himself. A man who believed in God and in the inevitable pattern of the universe may have securely watched the lights go out. He did not. The dis-ease in his heart began to rot and fester as the scarlet light pulsated with the beat. A brutal rage rose up in his chest and nearly choked him. He wished it actually would, but instead it made him angrier. How dare the universe end, how dare it go out and leave him all alone in the dark!

And then it did.

The last rotting remains of the crimson sun’s fetid light pulsed out of existence and he was alone.

Alone, he was alone with his thoughts and the cold and all the people he had left behind, who might have not existed except in his own head. They would emerge to the forefront of his consciousness and fall away, leaving only the infinite darkness outside and inside of himself. 

I wait at the table, wondering how long my child will take? I am teaching him to hold a pencil but he keeps dropping it like a flake. You see there is dead end that our power tension has reached and suddenly everything has stopped working as the internet has been breached.

We are the last of our generation who knew what wonders body and mind can do. Their combination used to be ecstatic, a feeling my son never understood. We talked about invention and wrote some poetry; but all I see in him are zombie eyes that follow the phone's trajectory. Oh yes, there are some good things that technology got along, but now no one ever reads a book or hums into a song.

From Wheels to Deals, from travel to shovel, from books to business we had our embodied energy to harness. We could work in ice boxes and brave the heat of boiling metal furnace. But here I am struggling with the advancement of humankind, he has used his fingers so much on games that my son has lost his mind.

His friends laugh when they see a book, they try not to hold it. Their hands are not used to paper, nor do they know how to fold it?

It may seem so okay, when the child is just five and wants to play,

But here I talk about a man of twenty, digitalized and confined to a wireless array.

Studies, of course he did, but I no notebook to proudly show the ten on ten,

Everything is on-line or cloud nine, and at twenty he can no more hold a pen.

But us mother's always have hidden, a trick or two up our sleeve,

I agreed with him that internet is dead, for sometime let him grieve,

Then gave an apt knuckle on his head, and dragged the sombre man out of bed,

I made it clear in my Momster tone, "No work then you will not be fed."

He was aghast, to live in ways of past, and even considered me as bonkers because of grey.

I made it clear in a tone to fear, "Work or in this house, you won't stay!"

Yes there is a fault in our stars,

And the proof lies in our scars

They brought us together is their fault,

The waiting, the raging got life to a jolt.

We grew dealing with wounds in our hearts,

Realising love in our moments apart,

Our dreams forayed from being together,

I did not hear and you understood me neither,

Our desperate attempts to find love in someone else,

While our names echoed in each other's pulse,

And then came a time, we looked at the face of death,

We decided to hold on with every breath,

We knew now, love was more profound,

It was beyond the "I love you" sound,

The scars on hearts are proof that we more than exist,

And when death does do us apart, our love persists!

© CopyRight Vibha Lohani 2016