Twenty-One Years

One day we won't meet for twenty-one years. Between you and me, twenty-one years of distance will stand proud, head held high.

In these twenty-one years, much will change.

Two or three more human flowers will bloom in your home. Your boundary-crossing belly will advance another couple of inches in fat production. The creases on your forehead will multiply several times over. That narrow expanse of forehead will be claimed by a barren land called baldness.

One day between you and me too, twenty-one years of fire will rage and roar.

You'll pretend to forget, yet sometimes, when the night grows deep, you'll go to the bathroom and weep, biting your lips. Even in the thick of terrible busyness, someone's memory will pierce your chest with sharp, stinging pangs. The doctor will announce: your pressure has risen, you've developed diabetes, hypertension has settled in. Along with gastric pain. In the name of surgery, they'll cut and carve open your chest to examine it. They'll search meticulously but no one will see anything there. No one will ever know that there, in that very chest, my unbroken, bodiless dwelling of twenty-one years has been tearing and devouring your heart, continuously.

Even after twenty-one years, no one will see anything at all. No one, absolutely no one...