“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.” ~ Scott Fitzgerald

The first time I fell in love, it was the taste of a vanilla ice cream.

Benumbing and tasty.
Easily melting in your mouth
and leaving a surprising warmth in your throat
that bothers your heartbeats with such an arrhythmical rhythmicity,
that you know you want it every day after school now.
You never see if the chocolate flavour is softer to your teeth
or the butterscotch has that crunch you always craved for.

You are satisfied and full.
Two scoops of it and you find the lightness of spring in the harshness of summer.
Every evening on the playground,
you run more swiftly across the fields.
You feel freedom a little more freely.

Because you know what is waiting for you
at the gate of the park at the end of the day.
That caress your lips urge to have,
that titillating funny shiver that the sweetness of the cherry on the top
sends through your food-pipe.

The butterflies in your belly.

One day you catch a cold.
The cough strangles the pipes in your lungs that you wriggle and struggle and shriek,
slowly dying of breathlessness.

No medicine works.
It doesn’t let you sleep.
It is beating and marring you down, contracting your vocal cords and crushing your speech.
It is murdering you.
You promise that you will never have that ice cream again.
But till then your eyes close and mind blanks out.
You die.

But somehow your body still walks around without a soul.
You are always in the crowd but feel desolate.
You know you are nothing.
You don’t feel ecstasy or depression,
It’s all meant to be hidden and not shared.

One day, you have a sip of whiskey.
It tastes strong.
Pricking but precious, like diamonds running down your throat.
You take two more sips.
And then one more.
Every time the fluid touches the wounds in your throat, it heals it by burning it.
And with the ash of those very wounds, you find your soul resurrecting.
The ash is not ash, it is cement.

Your body is now growing back to life,
your eyes are getting their sparkle back
and your voice doesn’t crack down when you laugh loudly now.
Your body ain’t resistant to happiness anymore.
You are now so whole that you can give a little of you
to anyone you want and still not reduce to a speck.

But questions haunt you.
What if you get addicted to it and dive too deep?
What if you get so drunk that you can’t recognize yourself anymore?
What if you die again?
But of course, a life without a soul wasn’t life at all.
And if your soul needs red ribbons around it to be kept together,
it’s okay to leave yourself at the strength of them.

Life is beautiful now, so beautiful that you often mistake summers for spring.
And you don’t remember if you have felt this ever before anytime during school or after.
There are all kinds of love in the world but never the same love twice.
And now, after getting too drunk on the feeling, something bothers you inside your body.
You go to the corner of your room and being intimidated,
silently kneel down on the ground.

You put a hand on your belly.
They are there.
The butterflies.
They are alive.

 

Relephant Read: 

While We Fall in Love.

–

 Author: Bijaya Biswal

Volunteer Editor: Megan Ridge Morris/ Editor: Travis May

Photo:  Reebs/Wikimedia