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Here's a birthday special poem of mine! I turn 18 today, and I've reflected a lot on the past year. I honestly went through a lot (and still haven't recovered yet...haha..), but this poem holds what the year left behind, it's my attempt to sit with it - without fixing it, without softening it in any way (and somehow pray I don't just stay in someone's memory).

This poem is a tribute to the eighth emotion of the Navarasa, Shanta, which depicts peace, and the slow, uncertain process of arriving there. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing this (minus the tears..oops)

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I keep mistaking memory for direction.
Every thought bends back to you,
smoke returning to a room
already emptied of fire.

I called this healing,
this circling.
As if naming the wound
might persuade it to close.

My mind learned your shape too well.
Every future pauses there,
as though peace were a place
I could only enter through you.

Even hope became a negotiation
if you return, if I soften,
if love remembers its way back
Longing, dressed as faith.

Then, without announcement,
the body releases its vigil.
Breath arrives unafraid.
Silence no longer waits
to be filled.

Peace does not erase you.
It simply loosens the hold.
You become something I survived,
not something I pursue,
a horizon I can admire
without walking toward

- Mridini

(Rasa: Shanta (Peace))





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