'Are', in the present tense.

Today you are 30. 

This year I will be 28. The same age when you "left". And did you really leave though? did you choose to? were you ready? Is anyone ready?

Today is not a good day. I will cry, choke up, light candles by your pictures, go through the letters you sent me and cry some more. Not because we'd be celebrating this day together, but because...instead of all the places you'd have seen, code you'd have written, thoughts you'd have shared, there is now a blank space. A space where I'm left guessing, imagining and for the most part conjuring images of your face and body here. I know what to say to you, more than often I say it out loud in my empty room. Thank God for the simulation of 28 years of Gid programmed in my brain. It's muscle memory.

However, It's too much, to have this full blown conversation with you. I can't bring myself to conjure up all the mundane thoughts, unique interpretations of your escapades on the road, at work or online, you'd have shared with me. Because a quick Google search tells me  "you would have" in grammar, is sometimes called "modals of lost opportunities", and rightly so.

So instead, I grieve. 

Grief, like I've read is really the "last act of love I can offer" you. Isn't it deeply disheartening that this is all I can offer you? Then you show up in my dreams as if to say, "I'm here". 

Noone prepared me for this maddening and persistent dissonance. 

Nonetheless, in my dissonance, in this vague in-between of aging with and without you, you are 30.

Happy Birthday Gid. 

You are in my heart. You are 30.

'Are' in the present tense. 

-Apphia D'souza

Until we meet again

I really wish this is true ; that we meet
the ones we have lost.
I wonder if it's something I say to myself to make sense of this ache or is it because my brother reassured me that we will meet again for fear he felt I would lose my sanity without him here on earth.

I was thinking of my walk in Kodaikanal with a close friend who said , " I wish I could kill you so you both could just be together" and I feel that so much. Not to die. To really meet my brother again. To see my nephew and both my grandmas in their best selves, living their best lives ; not when they were sick and compromised in their last days.

There is a longing to meet again in our casual and mundane moments, warm embraces, candid laughter and secret jokes in all the corners of the house where the light shines,not because of the sun but radiating from the love we have for each other that noone else will share.

-Apphia D'souza