“TW: miscarriage”

Prashsti Asthana

Art of Creative Unity Award 2021 | Honorable Mention (21 and under)

It all began in the cold end of January in the hospital room.

It was night when maa bled for hours and sang lullabies for her lost child.

She felt so close yet so far from her Sun’s light.

She blinked thrice, died a couple of times, stayed awake ‘til the morning and watched her lost angel become the sun in the sky.

After two bloodstained years, with a gory vision, maa gave birth to me on a cold empty night. which is why I see blood every time I close my eyes. She placed me in the sky and I’ve been her moon ever since.

Maa and I always share a bed, but we never share dreams

The emptiness in her womb from the hospital room -where she laid in a pool of blood-, sometimes crawls between us and sleeps there.

But maa and I never sleep and on those empty days we step into the morning with me looking at the empty space in the bed, in between us and maa looking at me.

We blink twice with bags of remorse clinging onto our eyelashes.

She’s guilty of loving me less and I’m guilty of not being the person she could love.

And so, on those random days, maa makes my braids and weaves with the strands of my hair, the love she couldn’t give me. She always kisses my head in the end as a promise that she will, soon.

Some days maa just stares at the blue sky, looks at the sunlight and feels the warmth sent by her lost angel from heaven, penetrate her skin.

The other days, she looks the moon dead in the eye, stabs it a couple of times for shining in her lost angel’s light.

Maa doesn’t understand how a span of a couple of hours changes her love for the sky- which holds the sun as warm and bright as her love- into hatred as cold as the gibbous moon which hangs low in the sky-. She doesn’t know how to love me when her soul has clutched onto her lost angel’s halo.

If I wanted, I could become Maa’s son but never her sun.

Every other night maa looks at me when I bloom in the sky like a crescent moon and calls me beautiful but she never notices that half of me is dead and the other half is dying.

She says whenever she thinks of us, we’re in fragments but I tell her to take her time, I’m taking care of the love it takes for broken souls to glue their fragments.

And so, on days like these, I wish to become maa’s lost angel but at the end of the day whenever maa will look at the sky,

She’ll be maa’s sun who was always more alive than dead for her and I’ll be maa’s moon who was always more dead than alive for her.