My candlelit heart jostles
Into a house without electricity,
But I have a book in my hand.
Just like the fate of a heroine
Who coincidentally bumps into
The love of her life,
The book I am holding
Is ironically called
“All the Light We Cannot See.”
By the windowsill,
Under the quiet aging leaves of palm,
I read in a cacophony of worldly noises ━
A banter with a street vendor,
A news channel opining about my city,
Two friends with alacrity in their voices.
Suddenly, I remember ━
As if the writer’s devotion to her prose
Reminds me of my devotion to my writing.
I turn on the small light,
Shine a light to my eyesight.
Engrossed in a fictional tale,
I sit in the real world.
Without a warning, like it happens in life,
The tube light switches on,
The fridge groans,
The exhaust fan whirs.
My thoughts leave their shelves,
And fall out on to the floor
As if they were stuffed in a closet
And someone, unaware, opened the door.
Melancholy begins to take over
My once candlelit heart,
Much like the moon does eclipse
The mighty sun.
I realize I liked my ephemeral zeal.
And the noise of the multilingual banter
More than the modern world
I was now locked into
Albeit of my own accord.
And for the first time in uncountable time,
I feel like the script in which I write now
Is not the script in which
I desire to be loved.
I have been loving in words,
But if you wished to reciprocate,
I would beseech you, Mother Nature,
To abandon the singularity
And endow me with loves
Twisting on your tongue
Until they became lafz.
