Showcasing Student Creativity
Aadya Jha, Contributor
Trigger warning: mentions of suicide
Starry night
You and I
Holding hands
Peering into each other’s eyes
Drunk on daydreams
We dance sloppily
On a love song
Worded in an unheard language
Played in an exuberant bar
In a foreign land of whiskey and pixie dust
As the song progresses
You hold me closer
And I breathe into your ears
The singer sings drowning in the music
estasi
And I wonder if it means the joy of having formed a meaningful connection
Or it’s just me narcissistically making everything about me.
In your embrace, I seek acceptance
In the smell of my hair, you seek home
You run your hands down my back
Drawing a heart
I tickle the back of your neck
Just to hear you laugh
I wonder if it still hurts
Being you, when the world has stabbed you with its deceit
You nudge my shoulders as you ponder if they’re still weighed down by expectations
I lost myself a long time ago
When they threw their demur at me
Breaking down each part of my esteem with their scathing judgments
You died a long while ago
When you lost the ones who built you
Dashing like the tower built on faux promises
Remnant dusts of which still choke you at night
Yet in each other’s arms we seek revival
Or at least a temporary straw to grasp for a moment of relief
I adore the soothing silence between our conversations
I love the incoherent sequence of our storytelling
I smile at the words you stammer at
I delight at the sight of you going on about how neoclassical metal should be mainstream
Or how Metallica is overrated
I appreciate how you sit through every Hitchcock classic with me or when you bought me Kubrick’s cassettes.
Where would I feel accepted with all my eccentricities if not in your company
Where would you have been if not sailing to this Neverland with me
The song ends and we’re still holding each other
Softly humming our gibberish version of its words
I close my eyes to remember the euphoria I was high on tonight
You wipe away your tears of realization
It’s only now and this now never returns again
Starry night
And snow falls on us
It’s now
And seldom do we live in our now
And that too with so much joy.
