No Name

I wonder if she does it too

types my name in the search-bar
lowers her eyes in embarrassment
every time
the internet remembers
all she longs to forget.

says hello

when she bumps
into a face she recognised
from my profile picture

knows
we have the same nick name in bed

feels vain in her veins
when she catches herself
Looking at my pictures
Listening to my songs
Emulating my smiles -
wears her eyeliner the way I do.

if she, too, has felt the need
to interrogate and assert,
The silence between songs
The whiskey tears
the cleared call logs.


if she'd leap
if I told her
that my biggest fear
is to sleep under the flame of postulating
That him and her
are like boomerangs on fire;
why else do they return and burn
each other a degree deeper every summer?

Would she smile
if she found out
I've run out of  medicines
to cure those burns?

I have mistaken tears for crystals

shivered in the afternoons
subjected myself
to the banality and selfishness of envy,
and
I have, all along, worried
she worries the way I do.

if I could,
I'd tell her
loving him was equivalent
to preparing myself for loss
that we are both two halves
of a single man's fetish.

If I could,
I'd hug her
for we're both made of water -
I don't know why we walked,
why we loved, what depleted us,
why we chose to be whirlpools
instead of rain.