User:Tejalmathew

Introduction
'Hello! I wasn't sure what to put on my user page, so I've decided to keep a secondhand copy of some of the little scribbles I write now and then. All of the following are my own words and thoughts, refrain from plagiarism of any kind or my goons will be after you. In the same manner, any similarities between published, existing works and those of my own below are purely coincidental. References to external sources are listed towards the bottom. Thanks for stopping by! <3 -Tejal'

The Timekeeper's Wife
9 July 2023

When I first saw her, I was immediately burdened by the melancholy of it. The basket-weaver; the subtle ache of one hundred lives where I've lived and lost her. I think, now, of what it must be, to fancy the timekeeper's wife. She, the phantom mirage of a woman, trudging through the dusty beige-gray of the suffocating air and the worm-holed road to the grange she calls home; at least, until her lover returns.

I think she looks for her lover in every life she lives; from the galley to the prairie, from the palace to the favela. She imagines it is her lover, instead of the old dame, who peers haggardly from the glass, sending hoards of unripe tomatoes and spotted potatoes all pummeled and bruised to her son, who has all but lived, in the windowless townhouse below.

I knew I should steer clear of that woman, her heart corseted against centuries of shrouded touches and sweet-nothings surrendered to mist. Although strangely, it was the mysterious misery that attracted me. Only I would wake by candle light at the piercing of wails that strung out in a sharp echo across the ghost town. I could not bring myself to sleep. When my propensity to quell the woman's despair grew too fierce, I resigned to scratching her name into the grainy chippings of my bedpost until I recalled, with a throb of bygone amnesia, that I did not know what it was.

The woman's wails, however, did not cease, and try as I might I could not open the padlocked door of my cabin to huffingly cross the road, forego the porched fence of the grange, and demand she remain silent. By pure exhaustion I flung open the bay windows overlooking the house, where to my shock, I spied the woman. She too, it seemed, had awoken to some sharp displeasure. I pitied her just as I pitied the dame, quiet now as she ran her soft fingers across the jagged wood of her open window, the frigid breeze clipping her face.

I found that I could not make a noise; I opened and closed my lips uselessly yet my throat produced no chord. The woman did not notice my intrusion on her evening; rather, her eyes remained resolutely fixed on the night. Towards the planets, or maybe the Moon, I supposed, where the mirror reflected, and she sifted through the galleys and the prairies and the palaces and the favelas to try and spot where her lover had landed.

I watched her a few nights, much to my embarrassment. I did not mean to shatter the wife's private tidings with her lover, but it entranced me. Her fingers whittling unspoken pleas into the frame, as if the mirror would fix itself into it, would transport her lover right then and there, golden in the soft candlelight glow of the bedroom. How insistently she waited, and how ardently it refused.

By day I saw her with woven baskets, how she fiddled with them, tugging on the tucked diamonds of pine needles that had already been tightly fastened. She did not spend her time perusing any of the townsfolk aside from the insensible dame, nor did she make a miserly chore of staring up towards the midday sun, as all the townsfolk did. No matter how insistently it bleared, ardently she refused it.

There was one night, I recall, where the woman's hair parted in such a way that the woven basket of braids, damp still by soapy bathwater, rolled like droplets in rivulets down her chest, how the frigid breeze swiped them away and sent ripples through her skin, how even from far across the road and up the window I saw her more clearly, as if looking into the mirror and gazing into all I have ever been, or all I ever was. I think it was the sudden ferocity of the breeze that provoked her to turn her gaze, ever so slightly, so that her insistence waned towards my window frame, so that her eyes would meet mine.

I think I might have exhaled at the moment her eyes stopped, widening, then softening. In an instant our distance suffocated me, that albeit across from the road I saw her safe in the grange, how selfishly I desired to jump out of my window and climb to hers, to touch our hands and interweave them, to blaze my finger against the searing flame of the candlestick and burn my name across her lips. Her eyes, I swear I gazed upon them across galaxies and prairies and through palaces and favelas, and with some almighty ache of a thousand stolen centuries together, I allowed myself a rattled sigh.

Her eyes fluttered wearily. She had found me and grown restless in the pursuit. I wanted to take the heat of the candle and wax her eyes shut, a soft and dreamless sleep. I only wished for my lips to ghost her ear as I whispered, "when you wake, you will find me again. How long, through your eyes, I have ached to find you! And how little longer, my love, for this ache to end!" I remember that she smiled as if she could hear me, and as if they were mine, I could feel the frozen blood in her veins thaw, then melt, then crumble into watery sediment, flushing and flooding in anamnesis like every planet's Great River had aligned in a mighty stream cascading towards the Sun. I could no longer hear the disembodied wail. I did not wonder where it had gone.

By morning, through bleary, grayish daylight, I was awoken in my own room, my window left ajar. I vaguely recalled the memory, and as I looked out towards the grange I found that there was no one by the window and the candlestick was dull, ashen and withered. But what of her now, the woman across the road, the timekeeper's wife? She, much like the son of the old dame, had been missing in this town for centuries. And I found that I spent my evenings gazing insistently towards the mirror in the night, searching for the face in the candlestick glow of my lover through the one-hundred-and-one lives I've lived and lost her. Though even if I found her, I could never bring her to me. I cannot remember her name.

The Far South
19 May 2023

I have long since cherished the bounds of your desire. I saw your west side alight with joy, the eastward of glee, the far north fixed with jubilance. But for all of our years, I could sense a bleakness in the far south, and for the life of me, I could not make it any lighter if I tried, and so I tried.

It is an inky blackness, a twin stillborn of melancholy that cannot be beaten to life; with the poking and the prodding, the tumultuous promise of passion and adventure, still it remains as dark as the night.

I believed in the power of radiance, the siren Pharos leading the craft against the crash of indigo waves in smokey plumes of charcoal air. But even from afar She sees the ship capsize and the mariner is flipped in the turbulence, his calloused hands desperately gripping the frozen metal of the rails, the bullets of rain stabbing at his face, the cacophony threatening to send him down, down and away, to the far south where Pharos will never reach him.

It is with this my head falls defeatedly onto your chest, my wails piercing the heavens and the sun cries, the goldenrod and rose melts into the despairs of violet and maroon. I think I screamed, I pleaded so desperately, for Her to save him, or at least to spare you the grisly sight.

But now I see it. Nothing, not the west alight with joy, nor the east with its glee, not even the jubilant north, but the far south — the obsidian black of the murderous waves, the mariner so disparaged he wishes he could loosen his hand and be done with it. In my wicked moments I say let the far south take him, but even in my own south he leaves the leading light and her Lady left to sing for the endless, empty black sea, whispering as pleading as prayer, "When will my lover return to me?"

=== Ol' Reliable === 18 December 2023

It's night here, most everyone gone to sleep or tucked away in their little hole of comfort. Our Christmas tree, sculpted upright and shining brilliantly in vain, is my only company tonight.

I often despised this tree. For the short time we had it, I couldn't help but compare it to our first tree, Ol' Reliable, the one that we'd had ever since I was a baby and served us well.

Ol' Reliable was a dinky tree that shed splinters of pine all over the light wooden floors. It needed to be shoved apart and our multicolored lights were always so haphazardly tangled that it took hours in itself to get them draped, unfashionably so, on Ol' Reliable's mangled frame. But it was sincere, I felt, the labor that went into perfecting it: the hours I spent cross-legged on the floor, alone in the red room, absorbing the gentle, buzzing hum of the electric lights and the blurring glow of each individual orb, all sorts of yellows, greens, reds, and blues. The soft, whiskery tips of twinkling gold, emanating a winter nostalgia too tender to recount. I remember my brothers and I, we hung the scratched ornaments of velvet purples and faded silvers, snowflakes and icicles and spheres. I remember feeling a soft sympathy that no one was there to witness the spectacle, so I made it my mission to watch over it. Inevitably, the glow and the snowfall would lull me to a winter sleep.

Now I lay here, the same red sofa but not quite a red room. A new tree, much larger, sturdier and full of synthetic pine, not a speck of debris with no reeds or branches to pull apart. The tree comes labeled with four sections: A, B, C, and D, neatly stacked on top of each other to tower over the room. The lights are built-in, not in droopy whiskers like before but in bright circles, with an almost blinding flash of gold. The ornaments too, are new and replaced, in an all-plastic assortment of pinecones and disco-balls of the same acidic green and lipstick red. The star is the same. You can hardly see it from here.

This tree is unfamiliar to me. It is different from when I was young, I am different from when I was young. In lieu of grief, I feel nothing at all. It is a home I will never return to and a peace I can never recreate.

I was recently accepted into college. I am happy to have this opportunity, many do not have it, and I am fortunate to be able to move away and grow a new part of my life. But it is times like these I wonder, what am I leaving behind? Is all I have left this little youthful memory, of falling asleep on the red sofa, drowsy at the softly-twinkling lights?

I'm not sure. I'd love to know, but I am faced yet again with time's eternal question: What will become of me?

I think I might get a tree. A real one. And someone to watch it with me.

Laniakea
18 October 2023

I'm sorry I couldn't be there when you woke. If you're reading this, I'm probably dreaming about it now. Like all of my other days, time sequestered and spent, anticipating the sun-kissed serenity, immense heaven that you bring me.

How can it be familiar, such a peculiar thing? How mortal can I be, to be captivated with an immortal devotion like this? Like how everlasting, when it's long since been withered to ruins, the rain will always love the little grove that used to be London; like the moon in all of its freezing, decrepit deserts, will always desire the flushed and fiery plasma of the stars; or maybe even like I write to you, the writing I always will do, because without stationery in the void of spacetime, I will not wonder how I've gotten there, but instead how quickly my letters will reach you.

To say it simply is, though I ramble and scatter my thoughts in ink, soak my soul in oceans and carve my heart in mountain peaks, it may be enough for you to guess I might adore you, even a lowly, ethereal amount. The tiniest particle of the cosmos is taught to tell you this, before it flickers to dust, as all things must, only for in billions of years to be delicately and painstakingly glued together again.

You may doubt my hand at poetry, but the universe has conspired it to be true; not unlike my all-too-peculiar, all-too-familiar, extraterrestrial love for you. === Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground === 20 August 2023

The Voyager 1 was launched into orbit in 1977. Its purpose was to teach possible extraterrestrial life forms about humans, our planet and our customs, our life and our memories. It was the first space probe to leave our Solar System, and has gone the furthest of any space probe in history, lasting over 40 years. It is one of the greatest achievements of mankind.

It brings me comfort to know this. When we are long gone, floating listlessly in space, there is our story. It is abandoned, flying in solitude. But it is our story. It is the story of how we lived.

On the spacecraft are the Golden Records, which are the actual circular instruments to which intelligent life can learn about Earth and her people. Carl Sagan, America's foremost and brilliant astrophysicist, had his son Nick give an introduction (in English) to the record. As well as this, are the introductions of the United Nations Secretary General and the President of the United States. Followed are introductions in 55 more languages, spoken all across our Earth.

On these records are photos of us, of our mathematic systems, our sciences and our evolution; our wildlife, our weather, our savannahs and tundras and taigas, our smiling faces and our most favorite Earthly things, like sunsets and supermarkets or climbing trees and eating ice cream. Here there is no poverty, no religion, no propoganda nor violence. It is a shame that we conceal it, but it would never make anyone proud.

I like to imagine I float aimlessly with the Golden Records. To be away from this Earth and yet still tethered to it, boundless yet wistful. I want to be anything but corporeal, anything but alive here and now, anything but who I am.

I will die eventually. When I dream, I pray that I sleep and never wake. I want to trade my soul for the Sun, die yet live eternally in the stars, frozen in empty space where I will have nothing left but endless time.

Epiphany
9 January 2024

Oh, my Claire, I won't tell anybody

About the secret spell you've cast on me;

I feel it most when you breathe, the worlds you create in the keys,

I am godless by your melody echoed in the wind and the trees.

Some see no need to exalt in a dreadful unruly heat,

And yet my love, you are Jericho to me,

I hear through walls your crescendo in footfalls lightly,

I let them guide me where flesh and bedrock meet.

When the war was enraged and the men with swords unsheathed

It was your song that drew them to the creek,

Just as when they were boys, quietly they sipped from the stream,

And their hymns would worship you as they did Galilee.

My Claire, you are the moon and the stars and the sea,

Your legend whispered by bishops God-fearing beyond the valley,

It is inevitable too, that you should so enrapture me

As to bury me in your Earth for all of eternity.

You are the passion that galvanizes the pliant and the peasantry,

You are the throes of power exhumed in palaces and cavalries,

Yours is the hand that Death beholds like the sinful at God's feet,

Your lips melt the wax that will meld me to Epiphany.

To the Pope I claim I am none the wiser to the realms you lead,

My faith will be etched in the tomb and my devotion in Firenze,

The people always questioned why God had cursed me so senselessly,

But I won't tell them it was you who cast this secret spell onto me.