Remember me?

Long long ago, when leisure was luxury, I had given an hour to your thoughts. It was a precious hour, earned after a day's hard work tackling the immediate. Back then, we were hunters and gatherers. We hunted for moments of solace and gathered half-formed, ill-defined, hazy dreams. The future was not a blur; it was darkness, stark, fierce, dangerous and unknown. Back then, we were small. We were fearing. We were awed. We were worshippers. We were warriors. We were nature. 

Then one day, the hunt led me to a full stomach, a safe abode and leisure, and I stumbled upon the vast mystery that was you. You were unknown, frightening, exciting; you were an ache, a part of me that was missing, that I needed to find. You were the dip in the centre of my chest when I looked at the dim moon, the tinge at the roots of my hair when a sudden chill would shock me, the emptiness inside me on a warm afternoon that I could not explain no matter how much I tried. You frightened me, and like everything else that frightened me, I was on the verge of worshipping you when I actually saw you. You, the strange foreign person with the shine in your eyes, you, who smiled way more than the whole tribe smiled in their collective lives, you who talked in a language I didn't understand, you who inexplicably were the answer to all my questions. I didn't want to have babies with you. I wanted to protect you, to hold you, to smell you, understand you, be you.

Back then, we didn't love or dream. Back then, we didn't create what wasn't needed. But I created a whole world with the idea of you. I was ridiculed initially, and then banished, left alone in the wild with the idea that possessed me. And I survived. I survived the real because I learnt to dream. I found music in the wilderness. And tucked poems on the branches of lonely, banished trees.

I died a young poet. One of the first. 

Do you remember me?