Dearth

 It was 2 o’clock, at midnight I was struggling to sleep, rolling to my right, my left, not even sleeping on my stomach was helping me anymore, so I went to the kitchen- tiptoeing and switched on the dimmest light, dragged the coffee drawer as sneakily as I could and as I turned my head up it was my dad standing on the door with his hands against his chest folded shaking his head “what? Coffee helps me sleep na papa” “I swear to god, ulte bache paida kiye hai teri maa ne” “kya hum aapke bache nahi hai?” “Iss mei toh bilkul nahi.” Then my dad comes near me and whispers to make chai for him, I didn’t say anything, I just smirked.

It happened 5 years ago, and yesterday I couldn’t sleep and it was 2, I went to the kitchen tiptoeing and suddenly the nostalgia struck me, that day from 2020 flashed before my eyes. Even though it was the same house, same kitchen, but today my dad didn’t wake up to find me making coffee to help me sleep, he was still sleeping in the next room, the drawer was the same, but all that had changed was time, years had passed by in a swish.

 Not a day goes by and I don’t get struck by nostalgia. I am just 17, but the amount of yearning that resides in me is no less than of 80-year-old.

Yesterday, I was sitting with my cousins in my nani ghar playing video games, but just as soon I got struck by that one day in 5^th grade when I went to friend’s house and played gta for the first time and I won. the cousins I was playing with, are the ones I taught ABCs, ate the mushed peas to make them eat that and just babysat all day, are the same ones who are telling me about their new crushes, the nostalgia hit hard because weren’t these kids reciting poems sitting on kitchen surface, like yesterday??  Just as the rain, the puddles reminded me of school and when it used to rain in dispersal, and it was sticky and humid, we all were soaking wet, but we didn’t care.

(God, I miss being in the four walls of brick and hating the guts of every single one, but still, at least the comfort that had built over these 14 years was there.)

I yearn, and yearn and yearn. I live in the past and forget about the present. Is this past that philosophers say, really a bad place? I seek comfort and happiness when I think about the past. Maybe that is why all the things that I speak to paper about are the ones that happened years and years ago. I am never happy in the present and always yearn for the past, and think that the future will be as good as the past that I keep coming back to.

‘cause “I’m just a kid, I never use my brain, I only use my heart”