I Don't Know How to Live Now On
Today, when you went quiet,
I knew you saw what I wrote to you, and you could not respond,
Or maybe you did not.
I never knew I would feel this way all over again,
I haven’t felt anything like this for so long that I did not know I could feel it anymore.
The fear of losing you crept in; shivers ran down my spine, and I froze.
The only thing I could hear was my heart pounding.
All over again.
I remember how seconds turned to minutes, minutes turned to hours, and hours turned to days, months, and years.
I thought I had closed the chapter and moved on with my life,
Only to realize over a decade later that it has always been there, somewhere inside me, flickering,
Reminding me of something so deep-rooted and untamed,
Which the time and space could not smother.
The love, the pain, the passion, the wounds, the laughter, the tears, the songs, the fights, the words, the dreams, the desires…
No, I did not move on from you,
I could not.
And now I know that I probably would not.
You said that if you could find any blot on the image of mine, you had kept in your heart,
Any blemish, any flaw, any scar, just about anything.
You would have been able to repaint the canvas and erase the tress of me.
But Hunny, I felt the good, the bad, and the ugly,
Still, I could not.
I knew that I would make a way to see you someday and ask
“How are you? How have you been? Do you remember me?”
But, never had I imagined in my wildest dreams,
That it would all be pouring over me in a flash, drenching me in an unceasing outpour of the whole gamut of emotions,
That was buried underneath the deepest trench in my heart!
I haven’t got the faintest idea of how to sail through from here.
I am standing with a restless mind, cold feet, head spinning around, teary eyes,
With a tiny hope in my heart in this unfathomable vastness of being,
Asking you to look at me and tell me
“How would I go on like this?”
“How would I get a hold?”
Tell me, “How do I live now?”
— Prudence
