My Body is a Temple

By Mayank Gupta

My body is a monument people come to visit for an evening and leave. To many, I am all bricks and stones, flesh and bones. To you, I was home. You noticed my thoughts and worries like a historian studying the etchings and engravings on an ancient temple. My body was a temple made pious by your touch. I could not have wished for an idol more beautiful and graceful. Your words still echo in my ears like holy chants and prayers said by innocent kids and the cuts on my back still burn like an incense filling the room with your cologne.

My body is now a ruin looted of its sanctity by invaders who came in the guise of lovers after you left. They tried to rip you off my chest like plunderers trying to steal the golden idol. My dreams appear dead as the soldiers who fought the attack, and worms of sadness and anxiety eat what is left of them, hollowing me slowly with each passing day.

Every time somebody visits these ruins and ruins it more, I scratch the flesh off my bones. The engravings break with the stones and my thoughts go into a mayhem and I feel the sudden urge to slam against the wall this journal that carries the names of all those who have haunted me every day. Or to throw it into the fire of my sufferings. But I can’t. For it still contains your name. I die every day longing for you, as if offering sacrifices to please the demigod. When I said your eyes slay me, I did not know they would kill me someday.

By Mayank Gupta