Sanjeeta Singh
Like it's a three-letter sentence strung around the corners of your lips,
the same careless way the wafers of kitkat stick around your mouth.
don't tell me I love you because you feel you must,
like all the love-stricken and longing- driven heroes of this world declare their love in shining armour and fragile male egos.
Like it's a branded new shiny car that adorns the big lawns of your heart, whispering too loudly for neighbours to hear and see your achievements.
don't tell me I love you because those three words don't stick in my mouth with a bubblegum taste,
the way anxiety and existential crisis does that brings the core of my heart and life in a squeezing hug as I pulls my arms around myself and forget how it feels to breathe.
Instead.
Curl with me in your bed under your favourite brown quilt and tell me how much you ache because you cannot take the monotony of life anymore.
Bring your arms around me and hold me tight like a porcelain doll with too much strength inside that fragile hollow shell.
Tell me you find my eyes matching the deep of the ocean and there were shadows of begotten storms in my Kajal that can bequeath the waves beneath the storm to your soul.
Tell me you need me in the voice you told people that you're okay when your football team lost an important match of the decade.
Bring me the ashes of your past that has stuck on the inside of your tongue like black paper crumbling too quickly in the fire, murmuring incantations of your wounds.
And tell me to heal you like that broken fallen flower I picked up from the ground, and kept in the water.
Not because I hoped it would bloom another time, but because I hoped I could give its last day a beautiful goodbye that makes anyone who sees it happier than they were.
But don't tell me - I love you.