And when I’m six feet under, and the bugs eat my heart,<\/p>\n
they’ll taste you before they taste me.<\/p>\n
Not because you stayed,<\/p>\n
but because you never really left.<\/p>\n
People think the dead become the earth, that grief is patient enough to wait its turn, that time settles like dust on forgotten shelves, until every name is just another name.<\/p>\n
I don’t think so.<\/p>\n
I think my ribs have spent too many winters keeping your echo warm. I think my pulse learnt your rhythm long before it learnt my own. And if the body remembers what the mind tries to outrun,<\/p>\n
then even death has arrived too late.<\/p>\n
Perhaps they’ll find the evenings I carried home without telling a soul. The conversations I rehearsed only to lose them between the station and the front door.<\/p>\n
Funny…<\/p>\n
I spent my whole life trying to become someone. A better son. A better man. A better hand for the people I could hold.<\/p>\n
Yet every version of me returned to the same old room, sat beside the same old window, and waited for a knock that had already happened.<\/p>\n
Isn’t memory strange?<\/p>\n
It lets you forget where you left your keys, yet remembers the exact shade of a sunset from eleven years ago.<\/p>\n
The exact laugh.<\/p>\n
The exact silence after it.<\/p>\n
The exact moment you realised forever was much shorter than it sounded.<\/p>\n
Even graves must grow tired.<\/p>\n
Imagine being the one place where everyone finally arrives, yet nobody actually stays.<\/p>\n
Flowers leave.<\/p>\n
Families leave.<\/p>\n
Rain leaves.<\/p>\n
Even the names slowly disappear from the face of the stone.<\/p>\n
Yet somehow<\/p>\n
I know you’ll still be there.<\/p>\n
Not beside me.<\/p>\n
Inside me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Like salt that has forgotten the sea but not the taste.<\/p>\n
Like smoke that has left the fire yet still smells of home.<\/p>\n
So let the insects do what they’re meant to do.<\/p>\n
Let them make a feast of every dream I buried before myself.<\/p>\n
Let them taste every apology I swallowed whole.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Every goodbye I never spoke.<\/p>\n
Every “I’m okay” that was anything but.<\/p>\n
And when they finally find my heart,<\/p>\n
they won’t discover blood.<\/p>\n
They’ll discover a place someone once called home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And when I’m six feet under, and the bugs eat my heart,<\/p>\n
they’ll taste you<\/p>\n
before they taste me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And when I’m six feet under, and the bugs eat my heart, they’ll taste you before they taste me. Not<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-expression"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4521,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4520\/revisions\/4521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsletter.niituniversity.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}