Do you remember
that night, when I called
you out of the blue, to
tell you about a fact that
I had recently read about
in a textbook? You were
never one for my academic
excitement, and the amazing
fact that I wanted you
to know got lost somewhere
between deflated spirits and
unenthusiastic grunts. I never
ended up telling you about it,
and it is ironical that the
fact has never been communicated
outside of me ever since.
Many other words have lost
their way coming out of my
speech system. Ironical
because some languages use
inanimate pronouns for babies
until they learn how to speak.
As if the only way to become
human is to learn how to
express and understand expression.
Ironical, because I ceased being
human the day you didn’t listen,
you ceased being human the day I didn’t talk.
I have been looking for
an inanimate first person pronoun
to use for myself, because I feel
the burden of ‘I’ too heavy to carry.
Smriti Choudhary is a poet who looks for decadence in the most beautiful things. Currently, she is a student of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.