Three Little Yous Poem by Shikha Gupta

Ever so often you wish
That the words they said
Would be yours.
That you could say it
The way they said it
Because you wanted to say
The same things.
Because you wanted
To say things.
Ever so often you wish
That the words
They would come
Unannounced.

The reason why we are
Where we are
Is because we weighed them bit by bit.
Bit by bit we weighed the words
The commas and the fullstops.
The ahs, the uhs, the umms
And the ha-has scattered in between.
Anything to draw the thread further
Anything to avoid going back.

And now to think of it
Is exhausting.
It's the magician's trick
Of shuffling cups
One after the other after the other
And asking you to find the one.
You choose one to place your finger
And your hopes on
And peak beneath
Only to find it empty.
You need to know the trick to win.

It's exhausting
To shuttle back and forth
Between then and now
Between You, (yOu) and yoU;
And coming back to the same place.
Familiarity is supposed to be comforting.

But it's a familiar feeling
Of familiar dread.
It's a familiar dread
Of disappearance.
Of being completely absorbed
Into nothingness;
So that no one finds your name
Your face
Your fingers
Or your nails
Familiar.
The way you talked
The way you moved
The way you thought
Ate
Slept
Dreamt
Laughed
Or cried... nothing.
Like you never existed.

Like I never existed
With You, (yOu) or yoU.

Now I'm playing with words
Weighing them on my tongue
And estimating how heavy they will be
On yours.
Whether they'll roll right off your mouth
And mind
Or whether they'll stay, as if in a lull.
Whether they too will be lost
In all the madness
Or whether they'll create one.

We've all played with words,
Just in really different ways.