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by Rachayitaa B., 17

It’s this sky again. I don’t remember deciding to come here. Maybe I did. Maybe my feet decided a little earlier than the rest of me. They usually do. Funny. I forget my birthday, passwords, where I left my notebook, but somehow I never forget the road to places that have watched me crying. Maybe that’s what home is. Not walls. Witnesses.

The grass is damp enough to darken my shoes. I notice it too late. Or too early. My fingertips are cold. Not painfully. Just enough to remind me that I’m still attached to a body. An insect keeps insisting on landing on my sleeve. Perhaps it thinks I’m part of the landscape. I’ll let it be wrong for a while. 

There are nights that ask you to speak. This one doesn’t. It doesn’t even ask me to think. It simply lets thoughts happen the way mist happens—without deciding where to end. I like that. Lately every sentence I’ve tried to write has wanted to become a conclusion. I don’t trust conclusions anymore. They always sound so awake.

Tonight everything feels slightly sleep-deprived. Even the stars seem as though they forgot what they were trying to say halfway through becoming stars. 

I’ve stood here before. Different year. Same sky. Or almost. A cloud wandered across one bright star for exactly three breaths. I counted without meaning to. One … two … three … Then it drifted away as if covering light had never been its intention.

Strange. Clouds never apologize. They never explain themselves. They simply become something else. 

I keep thinking about unnecessary things. Whether abandoned benches miss conversations. Whether the last page of a notebook waits differently from the first. Where that old blue sweater disappeared to. I searched for it all winter and now, of all nights, it returns before the sweater itself does.

Memory is so badly organized. It remembers the smell of chalk dust from a classroom that no longer exists, but not where I left my glasses an hour ago. Maybe memory isn’t a room. Maybe it’s weather. Maybe that’s why it keeps changing without asking me.

There’s a train somewhere far away. I can’t see it. Only the sound. I think trains are kinder when they’re invisible. They become possibilities instead of departures. Funny how distance edits things. I wonder whether the stars also sound different from where they are. No. That’s a ridiculous thought. I’ll keep it anyway. 

I used to count stars. Now I count the things that no longer hurt. The list is shorter than I could ever imagine. Although pain has strange habits. It doesn’t leave. It just changes seats. One day it’s in your chest. A few years later it’s sitting quietly beside the window pretending to admire the view. You almost forget to call it pain. 

Back then I thought flying would feel like speed. Like escaping. Like outrunning every unfinished version of myself. I was wrong. Flying, if this is flying, feels quieter than breathing. It’s mostly subtraction. A little less fear. A little less earth. A little more sky than my body knows what to do with. No miracle. No revelation. Just a tiny moment where gravity looked somewhere else. Or blinked. That’s probably enough. 

I think I saw you. Not really. More like … the feeling of almost recognizing someone in a crowd and deciding not to look twice because certainty would make it smaller. Your sky behaves oddly. The longer I look, the less painted it becomes. I wonder whether paintings get lonely after museums close. Or whether they stretch a little once nobody is watching. I hope someone told you that people still borrow your night whenever their own becomes too difficult to carry. 

The grass smells greener at night. I know that sentence makes very little sense. Neither do I at the moment. My sleeves are damp. There’s a pebble inside my left shoe. I’ve known about it for quite some time now. I don’t feel like removing it. Strange what we’re willing to forgive when the sky is beautiful enough. 

The dreamcatcher is still with me. Hanging exactly where it’s supposed to, collecting the things I never learnt how to name. I don’t know if it truly catches dreams. Maybe it only reminds them to be gentle before they reach me. Sometimes I think it’s watching. Not in the frightening sense. In the patient sense. Like old trees watch roads. Like stars watch oceans. Always there. Always keeping count. Always protecting, without asking to be believed. 

The wind keeps arriving in unfinished sentences. It touches my face, changes its mind, leaves. Somewhere a moth has decided that a streetlamp is worth loving despite all available evidence. I don’t blame it. We all spend some part of our lives circling impossible things. 

I’m beginning to lose the thread of what I came here to think about. That’s alright. Threads are overrated. One thought drifts into another without introducing itself. Galaxies. My grandmother folding warm clothes. A theorem | almost understood once. Hospital corridors. The sound pencils make inside a schoolbag. Whether trees dream underground. Whether birds ever miss being eggs. I still don’t know why that came to mind. It can stay. 

Tonight the sky didn’t ask who I was. It only made room. There is something unbearably gentle about that. No questions. No introductions. Just … room. I think kindness is often quieter than we expect. Maybe that’s why we overlook it. 

For a moment I forgot which direction falling belongs to. Or perhaps I forgot that falling needs a direction at all. Maybe flying begins exactly there, in that small confusion. Not when you leave the earth. When the earth briefly forgets to insist. 

It’s getting late. Or early. The insects are louder now. Or maybe I’ve simply stopped listening to everything else. The train is gone. My fingers are colder. The pebble is still inside my shoe. I should probably go home. I’ll do that in a minute. Or after one more cloud. Or after that star disappears and comes back again. Or … Maybe that’s all. 

If tomorrow I wake up heavy again, I won’t argue with it. The earth has always done its job faithfully. Tonight, for once, it simply forgot to call me back. I’ll just remember that, for one impossible night, the distance between me and the stars was measured in courage instead of kilometers. 

Kolkata, West Bengal, India