Unlearning you one syllable at a time

When your bright beaming dark eyes,
matched mine, locked like a stubborn vine,
I helplessly surrendered, like the petals comply,
Sleeping between the pages in your pale book, tea-dyed.
Chanting with each passing breath
‘Forever mine, forever thine.’
I learned you in quiet ways.
Your little habits slipped into my senses,
Without bothering to ask.
Your favoured words,
Became mine.
Your pauses, sighs, the lingered quiets,
Taught me how to soften a thought, 
When to smile, through silence, through voids that shine.
Loving you was a language now,
As if my voice wanted to be your childhood home, 
where everything’s just delusionally fine.
Now you are gone, the forever, alas, was actually timed
and grief, with its slow work, incessantly dived.
I must unlearn what once felt sunk in my skin.
Each familiar phrase feels like a mistake,
each habit a reminder, 
I did not choose to keep, to mean.
I stop myself mid-sentence 
and feel the loss of our words again.
You are no longer here to recognize these echoes,
Your voice, your mirrors.
So I carry them alone,
mourning your language like shards of broken glass, 
A million tinkling, deafening me with the warning
that, you, I now must unlearn.
Your once home, my empire Rome, frozen in time,
shall always burn. 
 

Tahseen Nower Prachi is a writer whose head is a koi pond of micro tales too scattered to come down to her keyboard. Find more pieces on The Minute Chronicles on Facebook.