Rainbows and Bougainvillea

You make home in the heart of
someone who helped mend the
one in you.
And you hope there is a home
in your heart too,
where they sit and sip love in
the afternoons.
You put all the things you love
in your new home;
rainbows and bougainvilleas,
songs that play with time,
journals that had never seen light.
And you hope that they do the same,
like stack old stories neatly
on the racks of your chest,
paint the walls with colors
that bend light away from
the cracks, press nostalgia
in the folds of your sighs.
But they find other homes
that they like more.
The light might fall better
over there. The echoes might
be less shrill.
The door handles might
match their palm better and
the radio frequency that plays
their poems might be
finer in the wind.
So they move without
meaning to and you stay back
without wanting to and
it’s disconcerting to live in a home
so far from the one in you.
So you learn the transit, and
eventually decide to move too.
They leave some stuff back like
a moment of vulnerability.
You forget some things there, like
a day of laughter that your
stomach hadn't been able to hold.
And you make peace with the
distance.
You learn to live in the home
they left behind.
You learn to save their leftover
love in an empty box of sweets
and go to the market alone and buy flowers for yourself.
You learn to sing along to the echoes and feel full at night.
You learn to sip love that you
poured yourself.
You learn to paint eyes every time
you feel unseen.
You learn to remember that
you were born in the home
you give to others, and
you must die there too.

Ria Mishra is about to start her life as a post-graduate student in psychology and has been a closeted writer since she could hold a pencil. She has interned as a writer at her local e-magazine and has also worked as a freelance copywriter. Having nowhere to put a truckload of yearning and despair, Ria has turned to poetry to stack them neatly into stanzas and verses. She dreams to someday convince herself she can, in fact, write well by being successfully published. She turns to Mary Oliver, Audre Lord, and Bo Burnham when she wants to indulge in poetry that she knows is phenomenal.