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This deeply moving poem explores how love and passion can veer into the realm of toxicity. What happens when we let love destroy us?
1. I looked at you with all the cacophony of the wild in my eyes. 2. You did not flinch. 3. My demons played hopscotch in your backyard. 4. You threw them scraps from under your table. 5. My soul hollowed at the sound of your name to accommodate space, they shrunk from within, my lungs filled with your breath, you were me, all of me. 6. Your eyes swallowed me whole. Slowly, slowly, till there was nothing left of me. Funnelled into the iris, no easy way out, right into the centre of your existence. 7. My skin was a map and your kisses were home. You inked me till it hurt, and then I believed all the places that didn’t hurt weren’t home. 8. The music of your voice was my only compass. Your best song was the way you said my name. 9. You filled yourself with vestiges of everything I was till I was nothing, just a floating apparition. I was sinking, I was scared, I was stupid, I was sad. 10. My demons are all dead, your plates all clean, and my compass shows me broken North and battered Souths. 11. You’re breaking, you’re fading. You’re calling out my name but it doesn’t sound like music anymore. 12. I’m gasping for air. 13. You’re drowning, I’m dying. You’re calling this love, you’re kissing me under water, I kiss you back to only realise this isn’t a kiss, this is stealing. This is stealing all my air. This isn’t fair, you’re flinching when you look at my half empty eyes. 14. I’m sorry, I’m lost. I’m sorry, I’m dying. 15. You’re not sorry, you won’t let go, for the love of life, you’re strangling my neck, you’re taking your first whiff of air, you’re breathing, your lungs full of life and your fingers cutting through my neck, I’m dying, I’m sorry I’m dying.
Now I’m half alive, looking for broken walls and shattered glass vases, blood and nail marks, and pain tattooed onto the skin like ink with a broken compass for company.
Because you taught me that any place that doesn’t hurt, isn’t home.
Image credit: Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara
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Dear Women’s Web Community Member,
You may have wondered at our being on the quieter side during the last couple of months. Thank you for your patience, and we wanted to come back to you with a detailed note on what’s been happening at our end of things.
When we first began Women’s Web, as a blog from one woman’s desk along with a few like-minded souls, little could we have imagined the heights that it would soar to. Over the years, Women’s Web has published over 20000 stories (almost all by women), empowered countless women with the ideas, community and resources to chase their dreams, employed hundreds of women in core and project-based roles, and in the process, emerged as the OG women’s community in India. It has also inspired many others to build communities of a similar nature, all enabling women (and other-underrepresented groups) in their own ways.
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