Mubashira Patel

disillusion

(field notes on ordinary weather)

my mother once said loss is just a sound
you stop turning around for.
we lived in houses where fate
was a cupboard too high to reach
and the key, always in someone else's pocket.
she learned to dust around it.

I remember my father watching
news anchors smile the same way
every night. he said even grief
can be rehearsed.
I learned to mimic the laugh track
before I learned to laugh.

in the city I passed men
selling used toys, faces worn
by the touching.
a girl bought a doll
with one arm missing.
her smile was realer
than anything I’d seen that week.

I loved someone who folded time
like a grocery bill—crumpled,
half-read, necessary.
he said I was too loud
in the places people keep quiet.
I said I was practicing
for when I’d be forgotten.

some nights I feel
loneliness coming in through the drain.
not a scream, not a song—
just the sound water makes
when it doesn’t know where to go.

once I asked a rich man
if he feared the end.
he said eternity is just a ceiling
you forget to look up at.
and then he told me to close the door.

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Mubashira Patel is a student at Mumbai University, studying sociology in her Masters. She has been writing poetry since she was eight. Fiction and philosophy are her great loves, and she blogs in her free time. This is her first submission.