Time is a perception of memories

and faces that pull a jumpscare when you least expect it.

Last week, it lingered

before the door with a name board painted in the brightest red.

C-A-S-U-A-L-I-T-Y.

My mind took the sharpest turn to the past,

pleading every moment

not to meet the next.

Aren't we all casualties?

Of missed chances blamed upon fate - wearing the brightest crown and

dancing at the absurdity that existence is.

Of perfectly flawed choices spreading its butterfly wings

and fluttering it along the cycle of paradoxes.

Of the falling rocks of cosmic jokes

against the defences built to protect our life sky high.

With a parched throat and body leaking into the blackhole of gravity,

I looked around to only break a little more.

Trembling fingers beading the rosary,

lips quivering to the verses of prayers,

sunken eyes,

head buried in hands,

stretchers going in and out of the ambulance

and a hundred hearts sinking in grief.

Grief is a furball that curls in tight and hides in a corner.

Only the fur is thorned, and the corner is on a spotlight.

(Either you fight this or you turn to flight)

Forty-eight hours later, I was in the waiting room

with eyes planted and ears pinned at the door of the ICU.

Forty minutes later my Father recognised me

and called me

by someone else's name.

A fleeting second in the vast universe,

a missing node in the neural connections

where names are either lost or found.

The moment felt like a million threads running inside my body,

that shrinks a little too much when you are drowning,

clenching every part of your body.

I stand with ache-

ache of a phantom limb

I walk away.

Until the next time, I am found again,

by someone else's name.