The password to my phone is still my best friend’s birthday
Who still won’t call me up when she knows I’m in town
Just like the whole past year
The place on the parapet where i used to sit is filled with new plants
(More plants)
Maybe my mother found foliage as an adequate replacement to an absent daughter
Everything looks picture perfect
Yet everything feels hollow
The town that gave me birth now tells me I don’t belong here
The aunties pick on the new colors in my hair
While I shade card the green in their eyes
I feel bare even with the extra clothes I have donned to fit into their small town minds
Some ask me what I did there
Some ask me what I’m doing here (matchmaking, perhaps?!)
A year seems a unit of distance and not time, when the people you held dear don’t know how to welcome you anymore.
The roads are filled with dirt and gravel
I call it indignation
The dwellers call it slow progress to a “smart city” as the city chokes me with forgetfulness and dust
I have forgotten all the ways I lost my heart in
I’m scared to leave my house
(To lose the last resemblance to what feels like home)
When did it become like this?
When did I lose all traces of me in me?
Or is it blessed amnesia
Keeping me from the pain of the past
(Sigh)
Guess I would never know
For I tried finding myself so much in foreign cities
That I got lost in the very city I grew up in.
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