“The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.”
― M.L. Stedman
Endless is the sky over my balcony
when the neighbours are all asleep
and I am convinced
the day we discover boundaries,
and colonise the universe
is the day
we will stop being human.
When we hurt
from our bodies splitting open
and imagine frightful hours
of endless pain for ourselves
the sky exists to tell us why
we will remain whole –
‘only I am endless
and I know’.
When we feel alone
like unheld hands in a room
with no lights and worse
no switches
the sky rumbles in a timelapse
and introduces us to others
who lived beneath it feeling
the same endless darkness
and it starts to glow
a little.
When we are waiting endless waits
when we are fighting endless fights
the sky absorbs all our mistranslations
of reality and time
all our anxieties, all our complaints
soaked up with a deft hand
it gives us pause
it turns them into rain.
And oh, when we find
endless love in tinted eyes
who is it but the sky
that lets us elevate
that unfolds like a scrapbook
where we too can hang up like lamps
if only for moments.
And when we weave
experiences into metaphors
into words
who do we gift our stories to?
is it not the sky
who sits on them
and keeps them warm
for generations?
If I could tell you two things
I would say
look, look at the sky
stretch your plastic film corneas tight
and search for its edges –
you won’t find them
but I promise you will find
humbling stains
of your mortality.
And I would say
speak, speak your stories
let them go, weightlessly
I promise that unlike everything else
they will live forever
and this is when I will also let you in
on a secret, you see –
There is no sky above
without life below
what is the sky
but for our stories
it breathes only in the telling
it exists only in the asking
of upward looking eyes
and I am convinced
the day we stop telling stories
is the day
our race will die.
– Clevon Peris for MTTN
– Photographs by Manan Dhuri, Jyotinder Singh, Sagnik Talukdar, Aryaman Desai, and Krishna Hemant
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