Familiar

 It was nice to meet you,

“You” who was so ‘Me.’

The familiar loneliness that brushed over you

was easier to get along with.

It’s comfortable to see

The same emptiness rooted within you

that’s buried deep inside me;

The futile attempts you made

to fill the void in your heart;

All the pretense you put on to hide

the bleakness spread throughout your soul.

I know, to seek solace in your sufferings is cruel,

But, I think it’s comfortable to see a person

who is as broken as me.

When I say, we are the same kind of people,

I mean, people with the same fears;

people with the same pain;

people with the same scars;

people who are stuck in winter untouched by a moment of warmth;

people abandoned under the scorching sun in a shadowless place;

people who don’t feel like people amidst people;

people who are gulped by an endless dark pit in every break time;

people who need to keep their minds busy,

so the voices inside shut down,

so the screams inside get silenced by the busyness of the moment,

so the mind is exhausted to think of all that can go wrong,

so the mind stops picking non-existent negativity each moment.

It was nice to meet you,

“You” who was so ‘Me.’

Now, I am happy that you are not the ‘You’

I knew a while back.

And now you are the “YOU”

who is full of life, full of love, full of light,

who makes me want to become familiar with the new unfamiliar ‘You’!

-Pallavi Kabbinhithlu